Mind map created using Cornerstone: Visual Thinking

Surveys are now being held as the answer to bullying. They are a means of finding out where, when and why bulling happens. Bullying has hit the headlines over the past few weeks and Children’s Commissioner for England, Professor Al Aynsley–Green plans to use Anti-Bullying Week to its full potential. He intends to ask the government to compel schools to issue children and young people with a questionnaire every term in hope of finding solutions to bullying.

It doesn’t stop there though; Full Service and Extended Schools are also high on the government agenda. Schools are required to conduct needs surveys in order to become a Full Service Extended School. Surveys are issued to every family in every local school, all parents of the pupils and many hundreds of local residents and employers to gauge their reactions to the schools proposals and plans for the future.

Such governmental requirements pose schools with a great many challenges, including finding time and the administrative resource. The trouble is designing and administering surveys is recognized to be time consuming – so where is the time available to initiate changes and respond to the feedback all these surveys collect?

Schools are looking for a solution from business and IT – areas that have been surveying customers to within an inch of their lives for years! Software such as Keypoint from Cambridge Software Publishing offers the complete survey solution for schools. It has a scanning module allowing quick and accurate processing and even a web & email module that enables pupils to be surveyed online. In conjunction with the Anti-bullying Alliance we have adapted their anti-bullying survey for web, email and scanning delivery.

free resources     Read the Shoeburyness High School case study. See the Keypoint Anti-bullying Alliance survey (in Triple-A web accessibility format). Download the Keypoint Anti-bullying Alliance survey here as a zip file. (Requires Keypoint 4 or above)

Keith Norman, Deputy Headmaster of Shoeburyness High School affirms, "We have been very impressed with how smoothly Keypoint has enabled us to deliver our complex Full Service Extended School survey to parents, pupils, local residents and employers!"

Survey software is cost effective and easy to use - precious time can then be spent understanding and responding to the results. Hence the message is – spend a little time researching the survey solutions available for schools – some work now could save a lot of time later!