Enabling Pupil Voice – using a Glow Survey
Overview
Theresa O’Hanlon is Headteacher in St Mary’s Primary School in Bannockburn. Keen to foster and maintain a strong school community, she always looks for ways to involve all staff, pupils and parents in the life of the school and looks to give them the opportunity to voice their thoughts and opinions on the school, welcoming contributions from all.
Context
St Mary’s has used a range of ways in the past to encourage members of the school community to share their opinions on aspects of school life. Theresa O’Hanlon is particularly keen to enable pupil voice to be heard and so approached P7 teacher and Glow mentor, Jennifer Toft, to find out if there might be a way to use Glow for this purpose.
Jennifer had already been using Glow Surveys with her own class for formative assessment (learn more about this in the cookbook ‘Formative assessment in P7 French – using Glow Surveys’). She realised that a Glow survey would be a great way to encourage pupil voice.
After discussions, it was decided that the school would use the HMiE pre-inspection pupil questionnaire from the HMiE website, to find out pupils’ thoughts on the school.
Setting up the survey
Jennifer created a Glow Survey, entering the questions from the HMiE questionnaire as multiple choice questions, and adding a final ‘multiple lines of text’ question at the end to give pupils the opportunity to make any additional comments they wished. She configured the questionnaire to ensure that pupils could only respond once, so as not to skew the results and also set it up so that the responses were anonymous. This helped achieve more honest results, as pupils felt secure knowing that no one would know who had said what.
The survey was then added to the Noticeboard page of the school site, to enable everyone in the school to see it.
In addition, the pupils’ permissions on the school site were upped from the default ‘Reader’ to ‘Contributor’, as this is the minimum level of permission required to enable users to respond to a survey.
Responses
The response to the survey was far greater than it would have been had a paper questionnaire been issued, based on previous experience. Since only pupils in P5, 6 and 7 currently use Glow within the school, they were the only pupils asked to respond in this way. (Pupils in P1-4 did also complete the survey, but did so in paper format). Within a week, over 60 responses had been submitted through the survey, and to date, there have been 92.
The responses are viewable in graphical format, with the percentages calculated for the number of respondents choosing each possible answer. This gives Theresa, as Headteacher, a quick and easy way of analysing the results, without having to do lots of statistical analysis and collation of results by hand. She can easily see areas where the pupils feel the school is performing well, and areas that may require improvement.
Jennifer talks about the survey in the following video:
Jennifer Toft: pupil voice whole school survey (1:03)
Ingredients
It did not take much work to have the questionnaire available for pupils to respond to. Since the survey sits on the school site though rather than in a Glow Group, the work was done by Jennifer using the Site Collection Administrator account. This included:
- Raising the pupil permissions on the school site to Contributor
- Creating a new survey
- Adding the survey to the Noticeboard page of the school site
- Changing the view of the survey web part to make the ‘Respond to this survey’ link visible in the web part
In the following videos, we will take a look at the survey on the St Mary’s Primary school site in Glow, then find out how this can be replicated.
Looking at the survey on the St Mary’s school site (3:48)
How the SCA changes users’ permissions on the school site (3:29)
How to create and configure a survey (14:16)
How to respond to a survey (5:19)
Impact
The school has seen many benefits in using a Glow Survey to give pupils a voice.
The response rate to the Glow Survey was far higher than the return rate would normally be for paper questionnaires issued.
The results are easily accessible, with the statistical analysis and graphical displays automatically done, saving the Headteacher time and giving a permanent record of responses. Since no paper is used, there is no need to file the questionnaires, and money is saved.
Headteacher Theresa O’Hanlon has the following to say about pupils’ usual response to questionnaires, their response to the Glow Survey and the impact it has for her and the school staff:
“The children are not very enthusiastic usually about filling one in by hand and see it as another chore. However the children were much happier to be able to complete it on line. It was a quick and efficient way to find out the children’s thoughts and this will influence next sessions Improvement Plan for the school. “