Feedback from ESF Parent Survey
The results of the Stakeholder survey have been forming part of our planning discussions over the past two weeks. I have already fed back to School Council and Staff and I will be sending something out to students shortly.
The parent survey produced some interesting and very positive outcomes. The questions used were the same as the 2014 questions so we had some good comparative opportunities. The big picture shows that we have maintained or increased the levels of positive feedback across all nine questions in the survey. We are extremely well aligned with overall ESF average scores in every case. The biggest improvement has been in the area of giving feedback on children’s progress. Two years ago this was a low outlier but now is receiving similarly positive ratings to all other questions answered.
The quantitative feedback can be seen here together with the outcomes from our school specific questions. This has given us a great deal of interesting data and we will take actions in a number of areas as a result.
The broad themes identified by parents in their written comments included requests that we continue to improve our communications (clearly better but can still be improved). Some form of weekly notification/link to the ebulletin was one example of this, as was a request for more advanced notice of major events. Parents would still like better solutions for Student Led Conferences. Here the issue is largely focussed in Year 7 and 8 (not exclusively) and the question we asked about a longer afternoon/evening experiment gained enough support to try it at least once. Actually, the question may not have been asked clearly enough as it is possible some parents thought the suggestion was to run an afternoon session ‘instead of’ as opposed to ‘as well as’ the normal evening slot. More details to follow on this.
The other Stakeholder groups were also very positive. The students were the most positive of all the feedback groups (which is a change from 2014) and slightly more positive, overall, than the ESF average. One pleasing improvement was that students felt that they were listened to more than they had in 2014. Again, we can always do better in this area. Staff responses were generally in line with the last survey with some issues around our ICT and system functionality within school and around resourcing in general. We will try and address these, within the financial constraints that we have.
Thank you to all parents who contributed to the survey – the final numbers represented about one quarter of the parent population.
With best wishes,
Graham Silverthorne
