SROB107

Standards and School Effectiveness

Robertson House

Six Hills Way
Stevenage
Herts
SG1 2FQ
Tel: / 01438 844824
Fax:
Our ref: / GJ/JDG
Email: /
Date:

Dear Headteacher

AUDIT COMMISSION SCHOOL SURVEY 2009

Hertfordshire County Council is working with the Audit Commission and other CAA (Comprehensive Area Assessment) inspectorates on the eighth national online school survey this summer.

Providing confidential feedback about councils’ and other local services for children and young people

The aim of the School Survey is to collect information on your views of the services and support provided, or procured for schools, by your county council and to gain your views on the services provided locally for children and young people. This includes all the services provided by Hertfordshire County Council, not just education services.

We believe this is an important opportunity to identify services which can be improved as well as those which are performing well. The information is used to help our self-evaluation and inform both the children and young people’s plan (CYPP) and the CSF plan. The results allow us to compare our schools’ views of our services with those of schools in other councils. A summary of the results will be published publicly by the Audit Commission in autumn 2009 alongside other councils and in the Director’s Annual Report: standards, quality and wellbeing in Hertfordshire schools and other settings in spring 2010. The information obtained will also be used to review Hertfordshire’s performance in the new Comprehensive Area Assessment of local areas by the Audit Commission and Ofsted. We hope that combining the needs of several stakeholders in this way will help reduce the number of surveys schools are asked to complete.

This survey is now carried out every two years in order to reduce the burden on schools. It has been streamlined this year to be more focused; the number of questions has been reduced by 25%. In 2007 28% of schools responded to the survey. We would really like to increase the participation rate and would urge as many schools as possible to respond to enable a more complete picture of your views.

When and how to contribute

The survey will be open for six weeks from 3 June to 15 July 2009. During this time it will be available on the Audit Commission website at

.

You will be able to access the survey from any computer using your LA and school establishment numbers. The website will provide full instructions for completing and submitting the survey directly to the Audit Commission. If you have any problems gaining access to the internet, please contact the Hertfordshire Grid for Learning helpdesk on 0800 0521 386, School IT Systems Support on 01438 844777 or email for advice.

A step-by-step guide to logging-in and completing the survey is enclosed.

Please note that the scale is reversed from previous years and is now scored on five possible responses:

(1) / (2) / (3) / (4) / (X)
Poor / Adequate / Good / Excellent / Unable to comment

I hope you will take this opportunity to contribute your views by completing the survey. It is important to us that as many schools as possible participate.

If you have any ICT queries, please contact School IT Systems Support (SITSS) Service Desk, . If you have any more general questions about the survey or how the results will be used please contact Jackie Goodhall, , tel 01438 844824

Yours sincerely,

Gill Jones

Head of Standards and School Effectiveness

The 2009 School Survey:
Guide for schools
This survey is being made available to schools in most councils in England to ask for your views on the support you receive from your council; and the services provided locally for children and young people.
The survey will be open from:Wednesday3 June until Wednesday 15July 2009.
It will be available online at:
How to complete the survey
1 / Log-in
Go to the school survey project website at:

Click on Enter the 2009 survey
This will take you to the online survey welcome page, where you should enter your LA and school establishment numbers (for example, 919 then 1234) and then click on Enter survey.
You will be presented with a few details about your school – please check these to ensure that you have entered the website with the correct establishment numbers. You should then enter your email address and create a password. We will automatically email this to you for your records.
Click on Begin survey and you will be taken to the Main Survey Menu of the 2009 survey.
To revisit the survey before the closing date, you just have to enter your LA and school establishment numbers and your password. If you wish to leave the website and come back another time just click on Save your survey and return another time.
2 / Respond to the questions
The questions in the survey are grouped in sections – the 5 Every Child Matters outcomes and a section on Service Management. There may also be a section of questions proposed by your own council. Each question should be answered using one of the five possible responses that appear:
(1)Poor (2)Adequate (3)Good(4)Excellent or (X) Unable to
comment
Please note that the survey scale has changed since last year.
You can also enter comments in the boxes after each section and in the further comments box at the end of the survey.
The survey can be printed in order to involve colleagues in deciding your school’s response, for example, administrative staff, governors, your SENCO and so on. Click on Print the survey from the left-hand menu and a ‘printable’ version will be generated for you in a new window– click on the link to Print. It is estimated that the survey should take around 25 minutes to complete online, however, this time frame does not include time taken to gather views of other colleagues.
3 / Sign off your survey as complete
When your school has completed the survey, the headteacher should click on Sign off and submit your survey as complete from the main survey menu.
Please note: This involves telling us how you would like your schools’ response to be used. The default is to remain completely anonymous to your council, in which caseyour responses will be added into aggregated analysis and we will pass on an anonymised version of the comments you have made. However, you can choose to release further information if you wish.
Help and further guidance
Further guidance on responding to the questions is available from the survey website. Hertfordshire County Council should be your first point of contact for any general enquiries – their details will be available by clicking on Further assistancewithin the website. You can also contact the Audit Commission by email at
Help for schools
Support from councils: / School IT Systems Support (SITSS) Service Desk,
If a school is not able to access Internet at all call the Hertfordshire Grid for Learning helpdesk (NTL) at 0800 0521 386
Support from the Audit Commission: / An e-mail based helpline for schools () but as most councils fromEngland have signed up to participate in the survey it could be overwhelmed. Please contact SITSS or NTL first.
If schools forget their password: / Schools are able to enter the survey as many times as they like within the live period, this is why we ask them to set a password the first time that they log in.
If a school forgets their password, they should firstly check the inbox of the email address they provided when they first logged in (the password will have been automatically emailed to them – this is why it is mandatory for schools to provide an email address). If they cannot find a confirmation email containing their password, then they should enter the website with their LEA and school establishment numbers – they will be taken to the Enter password page where they should click on I’ve forgotten my password, please email it to me. If they do not receive an email after following this process, they should email the Audit Commission’s survey helpline for assistance (they might have given an incorrect email address when they first logged in). The Audit Commission can then discuss options with the school – such as re-setting the survey to allow them to complete it from scratch.
Internet difficulties: / If a school has difficulty with the website (if for example the website does not load, or there are problems with answering the questions) it would be helpful if you could firstly check with your council’s IT team to confirm that it is not a local network problem and then inform us as soon as possible.
School IT Systems Support (SITSS) Service Desk,
If a school is not able to access Internet at all call the Hertfordshire Grid for Learning helpdesk (NTL) at 0800 0521 386
If this does not resolve the issue, please report the problem to the Audit Commission as soon as possible (Tel 0844 798 2039/2457).
Please see below for how to provide a paper-based survey for schools with internet-access difficulties.
Web vs. Paper: / We expect the great majority of schools to use the website to make a response to the survey.
However, we will also accept paper-based copies of the survey – we’ve designed an Acrobat (PDF) version for each council which you can download and print from your Survey Management page. Please ensure this is the only version of the survey sent to schools during the live period – it has been designed to give them guidance on how to make a response and also asks for their LA and school establishment numbers.
Please note that if we receive 20 or more paper surveys from schools in your council, we will charge your council £10:00 per survey (to cover inputting and data collation).
Paper-based surveys should be posted to the following freepost address:
School Survey
Local Government
The Audit Commission
FREEPOST LON17791
London
SW1P 4BR
Further dates
May - July / Communications to schools
The Audit Commission will make direct contact with schools via email: one week before the survey opens, again on the first day and halfway through.
July / Collation of data
All paper returns will be input and collated with data from online returns by the end of July.
August / Analysis of results
The data will be analysed and spreadsheets will be available that allow access to all councils results. A public spreadsheet will also be available with an overview of the results. See
for further details of these reports.
September / Release of analysis to councils
During the second half of September, school comments and any further analysis reports that have been requested will be sent to councils or posted within the secure area of the project website (
We will email the survey contact officer with access details on the day of release. We expect you to share the results with colleagues, schools and other partners of the Children’s Trust.
Further analysis
We will release further data, such as the Top-rated councils analysis, as soon as we can after the main release of analysis reports.
National briefing
A briefing on the overall results of the 2009 will be published as soon as possible after the main results.
October / Evaluation
We will undertake an evaluation of the 2009 survey process, resulting in proposals for future surveys.

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