Creating a survey
Once you have signed up for School Surveys, it is time to create a survey for your school.
Once you have signed up for School Surveys, it is time to create! We encourage you to book an onboarding session to support you in making your first survey by clicking here to access our calendar, or by emailing hello@schoolsurveys.com. If you would like to create the survey independently, you can follow the steps below.
Jump to:
Step 1. Logging in
First, log in to your School Surveys account through the portal.
Once you are logged in, you will see your survey dashboard. Click the Create Survey button in the upper right corner of the page to start creating a survey for your school.
Step 2. Choose your participants
You will be asked to select the required participants for your school survey.
Step 3. Choose your dates and times
Select the required open and close dates of your survey. You can edit this later if required.
Click the next button to move on to the question selection. You can move back at any time by clicking on the previous button.
If you would like support in setting up your surveys or need any additional advice or support on how to plan your surveys, please click here for our advice article.
Step 4. Set your questions
You will be then taken to the survey builder screen. From here, click ‘add questions’, and the survey builder screen will appear.
4a. Start of survey questions
You will first see our recommended wellbeing question. This question provides you with a longitudinal ‘happiness’ score’ for your staff. If you wish to choose this question, please select it. Otherwise, you can click the ‘Skip’ button in the bottom right corner.
You will then be asked if you would like to select a positive improvement question. You can choose from the selection or click ‘Skip’.
Finally, you will then be offered the opportunity to choose an improvement open response question. You can choose your preferred question or click ‘Skip’.
4b. Selecting your questions
You can select questions either by topic (e.g. behaviour, or curriculum), by searching for individual questions using the ‘search’ function, or you can write your own.
Hit the relevant button to choose your preferred approach (you can come back to this page at any time too).
Clicking on a topic will show you its entire question bank. Please tick the required questions.
Choosing from topics
You can click on the dropdown bar to see all topics available, or search for the topic you need. Please scroll down to see further available topics.
Clicking on a topic will show you its entire question bank.
To see the potential responses to the questions, you can hover over the ‘i’ icon next to the question. If there isn’t an ‘i’ then the question has an open text response.
To return to the topics list, click the blue button which says ‘Back to Topics’.
Question searching
To search for individual questions, simply click ‘Search’ then type a word or phrase and you will be given a list of potential questions to choose from.
As with question topics, to see the potential responses to a question, you can hover over the ‘i’ icon next to the question. If there isn’t an ‘i’ then the question has an open text response.
Tick the questions you wish to use.
Custom questions
We recommend choosing questions from our question bank as these have been curated by our team of question writing experts. We do appreciate however that you may need to ask something specific to your school.
All questions you create will be saved for future surveys, so you have the option to ask the question multiple times. This also ensures that you will receive comparison reports for this question.
First click the ‘write your own’ option and then click the ‘+ Write your own question’ button.
You are able to create:
Open response questions – these are questions which allow your respondents to type in their answers to the question you have asked. Simply type your question and then the ‘Add question’ button in the bottom right hand corner.
Multiple choice questions – these are questions which allow your respondents to choose from a number of pre-defined responses. We recommend keeping the ‘not relevant / cannot answer’ option in order to account for anyone to whom this question does not apply.
Once you are happy with this question, click ‘Add question’ at the bottom to insert it into your survey.
Single choice questions – these are questions which allow your respondents to choose only one answer from a pre-defined list. As before, we recommend keeping the ‘not relevant / cannot answer’ option to ensure everyone answering the survey is included.
Once you are happy with this question, click ‘Add question’ at the bottom to insert it into your survey.
Please note: for multiple and single choice questions, you can only create up to ten potential responses per question.
4c. End of survey question
You then have the option to ask a final, open-ended question at the end to give your staff another opportunity to express their opinions about any issues that they have been unable to earlier in the survey.
Step 5. Survey Builder
At this point, you will be taken to the final Survey Builder page. You will see the questions you have chosen alongside the chosen dates and times. You can edit any questions by clicking on the ‘change questions’ button and you can also change the dates and times at this point. Please click here for a detailed explanation on how to edit your surveys.
Please note: you can edit questions at any time until the survey opens but not afterwards. You can edit the close date whilst a survey is open but not after it has already closed.
If your survey is ready to go, you can click the looks good, create survey button at the bottom of the page.
A link will be generated in the panel to the right, allowing you to share your school survey with your intended recipients. Please click here for our step-by-step guide to sharing parent and pupil surveys.
We can also automatically distribute staff surveys for you. If you would like to know how, please click here for a detailed guide on how to share your staff survey.
That’s it! You can schedule surveys as far in advance as you wish and you may want to plan the term’s school surveys in advance.
If you still need help, please get in touch at help@schoolsurveys.com or call us on 0330 043 4469 and our team will be more than happy to help.