How to conduct an effective survey

Use our step-by-step guide and grab-and-go statement banks to save time and get the insights you need from parents, pupils and staff.

Last reviewed on 31 January 2025

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Contents

1. Set a goal for your survey

Surveys can help you:

Identify your strengths and weaknesses
Decide your future school improvement priorities
Demonstrate the effectiveness of your actions over the past year
Show your local authority/trust, governors and Ofsted the impact of past school improvement objectives

Consider why you're doing the survey, and what you hope the results will help you do. Set a clear goal for the survey based on this.

Having a clear goal means you can make sure that every question in your survey is relevant and useful. For example, a goal might be:

To determine why you're struggling to retain teachers
To find out how safe your pupils feel in school
To understand your pupils’ awareness of and access to support services in school

For