This year we have piloted the use of School Surveys to capture, pupil, parent and staff voice across the Trust and at individual school level. The use of this commercial tool provides a bank of questions which are benchmarked. This enables us to compare the results with those of other schools using the product too.
The outcomes of these surveys are received in the form of analytical reports which are then shared with leaders, Trustees and members of our Local Governing Bodies.
Our first pupil survey followed the identification of key questions by school staff at our Trust in-service training day on Monday 6 January 2025. These were then reviewed by the CET Leadership Group (Headteachers) before the survey went live in February 2025.
Across the Trust, pupils feel part of their school communities and most enjoy coming to school. Significantly:
- 90% of pupils report they have a member of staff they can trust and the majority believe our schools to be inclusive;
- 94% say they respect people from other backgrounds and treat others equally.
This is especially encouraging as equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) was a focus for staff training from January 2024. However, variation between schools shows that helping our children look after their emotional and mental health is an area for further development. Schools are developing their own action plans in response to this and the other surveys below.
Similarly, Trustees and member of our local governing bodies highlighted questions they felt were most pertinent to ask parents at the Trust’s Governance Seminar on Wednesday 26 February 2025. These were then reviewed by the CET Leadership Group before our first parent survey opened in May 2025.
Across the Trust parents generally report a high level of satisfaction with their child(ren)’s school:
- 85% feel their child is happy at school and 89% believe they are safe;
- 87% say their child has a trusted adult in their school and this correlates with the pupils’ responses to a similar question in their survey;
- 84% feel their school is helping their child grow as a person;
- 86% acknowledged their children are making good progress;
- 88% would recommend their school to another person. It is noted that there were significantly high responses to this question in 3 of our primary schools.
The Staff Forum considered the questions the CET Leadership Group had selected for the Trust’s second staff survey in May 2025 which reduced the number of questions and purposefully repeated some from the first Staff survey in October 2024 in the hope that we might see progress around understanding the Trust’s vision and values and sense of belonging. The CET Staff Forum, initiated after the first survey, also reviewed the outcomes with a specific focus on staff wellbeing to help identify our next steps and propose actions.
We recognise we still have considerable work to do to ensure all staff feel they belong:
- 80% feel positive about the Trust’s vision but only 29% feel a part of the Trust;
- 67% report they are content at work, but many feel better communication would improve their wellbeing.
Colleagues in our primary schools see more opportunities for knowledge and good practice to be shared. While there is scope for vertical sharing, especially around key points of transition, staff at Deer Park still have less opportunity to engage formally with their peers horizontally, owing to the absence of another secondary school in the Trust.
In a couple of schools, it is noted that some responses to the same questions were significantly lower than in the previous staff survey. This is qualified in some of the written comments of which we have taken note and discussed with headteachers and governors. These also reflect each school’s circumstances just before, or at the time of, the survey in May.
We thank everyone who contributed to these surveys and propose to use the tool again in 2025-26 to further inform our self-evaluation.
