Parent Voice Survey Results 2017
8th June 2017
Dear Parent/Carer,
We conducted our two-yearly Parent Voice Survey in February, to try and gain an insight into what parents and carers feel that we do well, and what they feel we might try to improve. Governors and staff find this information really helpful and we do try to take the responses on board, by using them to help shape our provision.
The response this February was impressive, with 116 forms received back. Many thanks are due to all of you who were able to find the time to take part. Many thanks are also due to Janice Orchard, the Chair of Governors, who entered every response onto a spreadsheet and typed up all of the written comments from the open questions.
In order to make the results easy to read, we have taken the 31 statements from the questionnaire and shown the percentage of parents who agreed or strongly agreed with each one. The full set of your responses and comments is available on the school website, in a filewhich can be accessed through the news section of the home page.
Below are the positive percentage responses to each question.
The free comments are not so easily summarized. However, the main thing that seemed to be a concern for parents was around the way that the school communicates with them. There was a clear feeling that more electronic communication would be helpful. Inter-linked with this was a request for more advance notice of school activities.
We have attached a letter setting out our responses to the concerns raised and some proposals that we have in the pipeline which may help us to address the issues raised.
Statement / % agreeand strongly agree1 / I feel comfortable about approaching the school with questions, a problem or a complaint / 93
2 / The school seeks the views of parents and carers / 76
3 / The school takes account of the suggestions and concerns of parents and carers / 83
4 / My child is making good progress / 92
5 / Teaching at the school is good / 96
6 / Staff expect my child to work hard and do their best / 97
7 / School teaches my child how to manage their feelings appropriately / 80
8 / The school helps my child to persevere when they find the work is hard / 90
9 / The school helps my child to develop the skills to succeed in future / 91
10 / Staff treat my child fairly / 95
11 / Pupils at the school behave well / 88
12 / The school teaches my child to respect people from different backgrounds, races, religions etc / 97
13 / The school is good at stopping things like bullying and harassment, or dealing with it when it happens / 78
14 / The school helps my child to develop positive relationships with teachers and other pupils / 97
15 / My child is praised for hard work and good behaviour / 97
16 / The arrangements for my child to settle in when they started school were good / 93
17 / I think the school is a safe place for my child to work / 97
18 / The school teaches my child how to deal with risks and behave safely / 88
19 / The school encourages and helps my child to take regular exercise / 91
20 / The school gives my child age-appropriate information on how to deal with things like alcohol and drugs / 54
21 / The school encourages and helps my child to eat and drink healthily / 89
22 / The school encourages safe internet use and gives children information on how to avoid cyber bullying / 90
23 / The school actively promotes equality of opportunity for all / 94
24 / The school is led and managed well / 96
25 / I feel that administrative and support staff are welcoming and helpful / 94
26 / The school communicates clearly with parents / 90
27 / I am happy with the teaching of reading / 95
28 / I am happy with the teaching of writing / 94
29 / I am happy with the teaching of mathematics / 88
30 / My child likes the school / 97
31 / I think this is a good school and would recommend it to others / 97
Overall, this survey produced tremendously positive responses, and it is very pleasing to see how much the work of the school is appreciated.
Having said this, the main reason for our surveys is not to produce pleasing statistics, but to help us look at what we do and to find ways to improve. To do this, we focus on mainly on the questions with positive responses of less than 85%.
Questions 2 and 3: It is hard to run such a big survey too often, as collating the results is a big job. We have conducted smaller scale surveys over the last couple of years. The last of these was around fundraising activities and parental preferences regarding school photographs and the book fair.
Together with the input of parent governors we have acted on a number of parental suggestions. All of the following have resulted directly from suggestions made by parents: breakfast club, cashless payments, the ‘red card’ system for registering late arrivals, our book swap event, our school Summer Festival, installation of heating into the infant cloakroom, installing drainage and carrying out resurfacing to the front and rear paths into school, welcome meetings at the start of the school year and half-termly topic letters.
The whole area of communications is more specifically addressed later.
Questions 7 and 13
We feel that behaviour at the school is a real strong point and that much is done to support those who are experiencing difficulties. The conduct of the children in school and in lessons is always commented upon very positively by visitors and especially agency cover teachers. Having said that, wherever any there is any group of people, there will always be bullying. We have regular assemblies in which we tell children about the positive behaviours that we value and why. We talk about bullying (and cyberbullying) and what to do when things go wrong. We underpin this with work on how to respond to real situations and strategies that we can use to keep calm and safe. We have anonymous worry boxes for children to post in, special benches for children who feel sad at playtimes (and children who will go and offer to play with them) and good systems for monitoring children who give us cause for concern. Our Year 6 children recently carried out an anonymous survey and the percentage agreeing, and strongly agreeing, with the following statements was as follows:
I usually feel safe at break and lunch time96%
Staff listen to pupils and try to sort things out fairly96%
The school has good standards of behaviour98%
Question 20
There were a huge number of ‘don’t knows’ for this question. In the second half of the Summer Term, we work through a number of health related issues with children in assemblies and in class. We talk about exercise, healthy food and drink, sleep, anxiety, smoking, accident prevention and drugs. The latter builds upon a series of age-appropriate workshops that the school nurse has conducted through school on ‘pills and medicines’. We have just trained in, and adopted, Manchester Healthy Schools’ Pride 1-2-3 Curriculum. This specifically addresses drug issues, albeit at an age-appropriate level.
Question 22
We were surprised by this score being lower than those for reading and writing, as our results show maths to have been our strongest subject over recent years. Our end of Key Stage 2 results for 2016 showed our children attaining at 14% above the national average, with the scores of high achievers in maths putting us in the top 6% of all schools. However, in order to better inform parents about what we do in maths, and where children are up to, we will introduce a new system, which we are calling ‘Maths Passports’, in September. We hope that this will make methods and progress much clearer to you.
General Comments
The overwhelming concerns here were around methods of communication and notice to working parents of activities. In response, we are taking a number of measures to try and improve these. Firstly, we now send out notice of after-school clubs before holidays, instead of afterwards. We also send out topic letters,with an overview of what we will teach each half-term. As we have composed a full year’s cycle of these letters, we will, in future, send these out before holidays.
The biggest change is that we are moving to a system which will allow us to text and email parents. We sat out the first wave of such systems, as many of the parents who had experience of them at high schools reported them as annoying, with a high number of general texts,irrelevant to their own children. We have just moved our school Management Information System over to a new platform and plan, from September, to start using its parent portal. This will allow us to send targeted electronic communication to you. The change of platform has been a big job, but one that we hope will address parent’s concerns about communication without just exchanging one unsatisfactory system for another.
Our thanks are due, once again, to all of you who replied to the survey. We value all of your comments, no matter how frank! We do hope that the actions we are taking will help to improve the service we are able to offer you. We thank you, as ever, for your support.
Yours sincerely,
A Kilcoyne
Headteacher
MauldethRoadPrimary School
Parent Voice 2017
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