DIY vs Professional Education Surveys
Creating a survey may seem simple. But when you’re gathering feedback from staff, pupils or parents, the decisions that follow are only as good as the data you collect. That’s why how you design, deliver and interpret your survey really matters.
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For education leaders juggling strategic decisions, limited time and high expectations, feedback from pupils, staff, and parents can be a game-changer. But only if the survey is designed to gather meaningful, unbiased and actionable responses.
What are the key differences between DIY and professional providers?
DIY tools are accessible and often free, but they come with limitations:
- Basic question design with limited guidance
- Little to no benchmarking or context for your results
- Time-consuming setup, delivery and analysis
- Generic reporting that makes it hard to draw conclusions
Professional providers like Edurio offer more than just a platform:
- Expert-led question design based on educational research
- Support with setup, delivery and communications
- Anonymised response management and robust analysis
- Access to national benchmarks for real-world comparison
Here’s why schools and trusts are turning to specialist partners like Edurio to make sure every response counts.
What are some of the benefits of external survey providers?
Reliable insights, not just data
DIY tools might help you build a questionnaire. But crafting questions that are unbiased, meaningful and linked to your goals? That takes expertise. At Edurio, we draw on years of research to make sure your survey doesn’t just gather opinions, it surfaces insights you can act on.
We expand on this research to create resources like the Stakeholder Feedback Hub, which empowers school leadership, exploring the steps of setting a goal for collecting stakeholder feedback, designing and implementing a survey, guiding leadership through analysing and drawing conclusions about their survey results, and providing support for taking the following steps with the data they have collected.
Before working with Edurio, we managed our surveys internally, and it was a challenge to analyse the data and present it to leaders in an easy-to-digest format and in a timely manner. Edurio does that work for us.
Time back for your team
Designing a quality survey takes time. So does managing responses, ensuring anonymity, and presenting findings clearly. Our team handles all of that. You get robust, ready-to-use results, without sacrificing weeks of internal time.
A key advantage of Edurio is the resource element—we don’t have to employ someone internally to research, develop, collate and review survey data. We can use experts to do this for us.
Benchmarks for real perspective
When you go it alone, it’s hard to know what your results mean. Is 68% satisfaction good? How does it compare to other schools or trusts? We offer national and specific benchmarks, so you can see how your feedback compares and identify areas for growth.
Edurio’s benchmarking data is derived from surveys conducted among teachers, school staff, pupils, and parents, making it the largest education-focused benchmarking dataset in the UK.
When asked about the most significant advantage of using Edurio compared to other providers or DIY methods, our response is simple: ease of use and national benchmarks.
Edurio has helped address the challenge of year-on-year benchmarking by providing the data we need to see progress.
Confidence in your next steps
You don’t just want results, you want to know what to do with them. Our team helps turn feedback into an action plan, guiding you through the next steps so improvement doesn’t stall at the data stage.
Edurio surveys have enabled us to have high-quality, sense-checked data on which to base our action planning and development prioritisation.
A smoother experience for everyone involved
From survey setup to support for respondents, we simplify the process. Clear timelines. Reliable delivery. No technical headaches. That’s better for you, and better for your school/ trust community.
The Edurio platform has totally transformed how we do stakeholder engagement and become the listening organisation that we aspire to be.
Better surveys, better decisions
Running a survey isn’t just a tick-box exercise. Done well, it’s a chance to listen deeply and make confident, informed decisions that shape your trust’s future.
If you’re ready to gather feedback that leads to real change, we’re here to help.
Let’s talk about your next survey.
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