Education & training
Parent survey
Ask the four things a family actually meets, and let the worried parent answer without a name.
Why this survey gets sent
“We send a note home and get a fifth of it back. Then at the parents' evening one father says the canteen is a disgrace, everybody nods, and I still have no idea whether that is one father or two hundred families.”
A parent survey is worth running only when the answers can be split by year group and read by the person who owns each area. Four minutes on a phone, no name required, and the meeting stops being decided by whoever spoke loudest.
What is in it
- Which year group is your child in? (dropdown)
- Communication, safety, the canteen, activities — one rating grid
- How is the amount of homework? (too much … too little)
- How often do you hear from the class teacher? (single response)
- Which activities should the school add? (multiple response)
- The one thing the school should change this term (long answer)
- Your name — blank means anonymous (optional)
About 4 min to answer
Parent survey
About 4 min
How to write this survey
The parent is answering in a car park
A parent survey is not answered at a desk. It is answered in the queue at the school gate, one-handed, on a phone that is three years old, in the minutes between arriving and the bell. Everything else here follows from that: a short list, large tap targets, and not one question that needs a document in front of you to answer.
Which is why the first question is the year group and not the parent's name. A grade list turns three hundred answers into twelve conversations — the head of Grade 6 reads the rows that concern Grade 6 — and it costs the parent a single tap. A name costs them their willingness to say the difficult thing.
Ask about what the school can change next week
“How satisfied are you with the school?” produces a number nobody owns. Break the school into the things a family actually meets — how the school talks to them, whether the child is safe, what happens at break, what happens after lessons — and every row of the grid lands on somebody's desk with a decision attached to it.
Resist the row you cannot act on. The curriculum, the term dates and the fee structure are usually settled far above whoever reads the answers, and asking about them raises an expectation the school will have to disappoint later. If something is genuinely fixed, say so on the page instead of putting it in the grid.
A question about quantity needs a two-ended scale
Homework is the question every parent survey gets wrong. Rated from poor to excellent it collects nothing: the parent who thinks there is too much and the parent who thinks there is too little both answer “poor”, and the two cancel each other into a comfortable middle that describes no family in the school.
Use a scale that runs from too much, through about right, to too little — and word the middle option as a verdict rather than as an absence. “About right” is an opinion; “no comment” is a shrug. The same shape works for the length of the school day, the number of trips, and how much the school writes to you.
Make the name optional, and say why on the page
The parent with the most useful thing to tell you is the one who is afraid it will reach their child's teacher by Thursday. Leave the name field empty by default, label it “leave it blank to stay anonymous”, and you will read sentences that no parents' evening has ever produced.
Then keep the promise in how you handle the answers. Pass a complaint to a teacher without the grade attached where the grade would identify the family, and report the grid by stage rather than by class wherever a class has fewer than ten children. A promise of anonymity broken once cannot be repaired in the same school year.
Send it mid-term, then publish what changed
Sent in the last week of term it is an archive; sent in week five it is a plan. Put the link in the class group with one line from the head teacher rather than an automated message, and leave it open for five days including a weekend — the working parent answers on their day off, and closing before it quietly removes them from the results.
Whatever you do next, tell them you did it. One short message at the start of the following term — here is what you said, here are the two things we changed, here is the one we cannot — is the largest single influence on how many families answer the next time you ask. A school that asks twice and never reports back is training its parents not to bother.