Sharing findings with staff
How you decide to share your findings is ultimately a decision for individual schools or organisations in School Surveys. Some general recommendations from the School Surveys team include:
- Stay positive! Negative feedback is always hard to hear but School Surveys is designed to be constructive. It isn’t personal!
- Think about how this feedback can be used in a way which is beneficial for your school or organisation.
- Think about which information needs to be shared with who.
Below are the processes used by current users of School Surveys, who have shared with us how they distribute the results in their schools.
Headteacher Andy Hencken describes how he shares the results.
- Deputies: It is important to share with your leadership team, just don’t share it with them on a Friday, because it will ruin their weekends. I send it out on a Monday morning. The two deputies both take it and both look like I’ve just shot the family pet. So we talk about it and I let them vent. Then, because I’ve already read it, I point them back to the things that actually are really positive about what they’re doing, and are reflective of the challenges they’re taking on. The change they’re leading isn’t going to be universally accepted, because change never is.
- Staff forum: I created a staff forum more recently who meet half-termly, and the charge to them is ‘This is what came out of the staff survey. You look for the solutions that you would most like us to do.’ So we’re not saying ‘We think this is what we’ve got, and this is what we’re going to do about it.’ We’re going back to them and saying ‘This is what you’ve said, what would you like us to do about it?’
- The whole staff body: One of the things we’ve looked at recently is the number of emails, so I don’t want to stick everything in a big email. So it tends to be something that I put on the screen behind me when I’m talking to all the staff. I keep it relatively simple, because what I perceive is that staff want to know what the big themes are and what we are doing about them. Am I worse off or am I less happy than people in similar schools nationally? It’s a less is more approach.
- Governors: I share the overview, not the comments. I have it calendared in at every governing body meeting. I share the headlines, not the detail, not the comments, but the comparative graphs that show how we compare to last time around and how we compare nationally. The governors have really appreciated that – they’re not expecting us to have all the answers, but they are asking us to have questions.
The process is half-termly. The survey is open for about a week. I’ll do the digest, calm everyone down. We’ll talk about it in the next core leadership meeting. Then it will go back to the staff at the next briefing: these are the highlights of what you said. These are the things that we’re going to ask our forum to pick up.
Sam Crome describes a similar process:
I brace myself, get a coffee, read the analysis, then bring it to SLT, and pick out the key trends and create an action plan. Then I abridge the report slightly, I put them into a PowerPoint, and I just include the bits that don’t have sensitive names on or don’t moan too much about the school, because some of it’s not appropriate to share. So the staff get that and I also send through what I’ve taken as the key things to work on, and what we’re going to be doing next. I’d like to think the staff always feel, here’s what we said, this is what the SLT took from that and here are the action points. I want to make sure that the people that drive to our school every day, I want everyone to feel like they’ve got a genuine voice.
At St John the Baptist School, Josie Belli has adopted this you said/we did format to share survey results and school responses:
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.