School Surveys

Online Pupil Survey

The Online Pupil Survey is designed to find out what children and young people between the ages of 8 and 18 really think about a range of issues, including:

• healthy eating
• physical activity and sleeping
• school experience including bullying
• vulnerable behaviour & sexual health
• safety & self-harm
• mental health
• future aspirations

The surveys:

• Capture young people’s opinions on a range of health and wellbeing issues
• Enable needs-led targeted interventions at school, cluster and local authority level
• Allow schools to analyse their data and compare with the local authority average
• Help schools secure additional resources and funding grants if need is identified
• Help in evaluating the effectiveness of policies and practice
• Enable schools to generate specific reports that can be used as evidence within the Ofsted Inspection Framework e.g. bullying, sleep, safety, mental health (using LodeSeeker®)
• Provide a powerful vehicle for pupil voice ensuring local politicians and decision-makers across different services see how children and young people are feeling and behaving
• Ensure allocation of resources can be more needs-led at times of reduced funding

The Online Pupil Survey/School health and wellbeing survey is run on a 2-year cycle - year 1 includes preparation of the questionnaire and delivery of the survey, year 2 includes in-depth analysis of the data. Our LodeSeeker® data tool is available once data has been cleaned and unrestricted online access is part of our 2-year contract.

We ran the Online Pupil Survey in Gloucestershire every 2 years between 2006 and 2018. Our survey in 2016 had over 30,000 responses. We work with other Local Authorities to build up similar data resources and are working with the University of Oxford Psychology Department to deliver the OxWell School Survey, starting in 2020 and including multiple counties in the South West and South East of England.

Our online LodeSeeker® data tool is used by individual schools to target areas of improvement and to demonstrate to OFSTED how they are actively monitoring performance and listening to Pupil Voice and is used at County level by the Local Authority and Public Health to address areas of need and to target resources more effectively.

Lodeseeker® offers many different types of reports, from County overviews to detailed drill-downs and from current behaviours to longitudinal trends.

The survey takes about 20-30 minutes, is designed to be bright, interesting and easy to understand. Survey access is via school-level login which means that pupils are not able to be identified by name. There are different designs and wordings depending on age and setting (Primary, Secondary, Sixth form and FE colleges, Special schools).

Children in Care Survey

The Children in Care Survey is designed to find out what children and young people between the ages of 8 and 18 think about their care and issues affecting them, including:

• specific care questions relating to placement
• safety & support
• emotional wellbeing
• future aspirations
• relationship to social workers and council

We ran the Children in Care Survey in Gloucestershire every 2 years since 2011 in our OPS ‘off years’. The aim of the survey is to give children in care a voice that is often difficult to find. Some of the questions are a subset of the Online Pupil Survey, to allow comparisons with the general population to be made (for example, by selecting responses from the previous years’ OPS) - these comparisons can easily be made using our online reporting and data visualisation tool, LodeSeeker® where different surveys can be selected and/or combined from the survey setup panel. It is easy to tailor your reports by using the numerous filters and report types available.

There are also children in care specific questions relating to placement, relationships with key workers, relationships and activities with carers and effectiveness of support mechanisms.

The survey takes about 20-30 minutes, survey access is pupil-specific (but pupils are not asked to supply their names) and is usually administered through schools. All questions are free to answer or not if the child or young person would rather not share their experience.

The Children in Care Survey offers Local Authorities and partner agencies a low-cost, efficient, quick and easy way to gain valuable insight into the lives of vulnerable children.

Foster & Brown Research

Foster & Brown Research deliver online surveys and reporting as a managed package, helping to take you through the process of gathering vital information and using our software and expertise to help you target areas of need as efficiently as possible.

We can help with:

• getting your questions right
• designing the look and feel of your surveys
• managing your distribution list and monitoring response rate through our Monitor software
• reporting your results through our LodeSeeker® data tool
• analysing your results using our expertise and helping you identify targets and trends

Contact Us

on 01285 700759 or email to discuss your requirements or ask any questions you may have. We are very happy to talk through what we are achieving with our Local Authority partners.

Online Pupil Survey

Foster & Brown Research are working with Local Authorities to offer the Online Pupil Survey-Pupil Health and Lifestyle Survey to ALL the schools in their area providing a powerful Pupil Voice telling us about the lives, daily habits, fears and aspirations of thousands of children and young people - information that helps schools, local authorities, health professionals and many other organisations concerned with the wellbeing of young people to plan effectively and efficiently.