Staff wellbeing check-ins that people actually answer

Most schools have already run a staff survey. Many have run several. The common experience is a strong response the first time, a weaker one the second, and a quiet decision not to bother with the third.

The design is usually not the problem. The week after the survey closes is.

Ask about six things, and keep them the same

Six areas come up repeatedly in UK research on why teachers stay: workload, feeling supported, leadership and voice, belonging and recognition, professional growth, and being able to switch off.

Six is enough to tell you where to look and short enough to answer between lessons. More importantly, the six should not change. A score is only useful next to the same question asked the same way last month. Rewording a question to make it read better resets your history.

3 minutes

Rotate anything extra. If you want to ask about a new marking policy this month, ask it alongside the six, not instead of one, and keep it out of the scores.

One open question, read properly

The scored questions tell you where to look. The open question tells you what is actually happening. One is enough, and it should be genuinely open.

Read the answers for themes rather than quotes. Never repeat a comment in a way that identifies who wrote it, even indirectly, and be careful with phrases that only one person in the school uses.

Anonymity has to be real

Staff can tell the difference between a promise of anonymity and a design that makes identification impossible.

Two things matter. There should be no stored link between who answered and what they said. Results should be hidden below a minimum group size, so a team of three never appears as its own bar on a chart.

The week after it closes

This is the part that decides whether anyone answers next time.

Pick a small number of things. Two or three, not ten. Give each one a name and a date, because a priority without an owner is a sentence in a document.

Then tell staff. What you heard, what you are changing, what you are not changing yet, and why. The last item is the one people remember, because it is evidence that the whole thing was read.

What to expect from the numbers

Expect the first month to be your worst reading and not to mean much on its own. Expect a dip in the second half of the autumn term. Expect leadership scores to move slowly, because trust does.

And be careful with cause. If a score rises after you changed something, that is movement worth noticing. It is not proof the change caused it, and saying so to governors is more credible than claiming otherwise.