Using safeguarding data

How Can Schools and Trusts Use Their Safeguarding Survey Results?

Over the last couple of weeks, our teams have worked extremely hard with school and Trust leaders to organise and arrange the launch of the Edurio Safeguarding Survey for over 40 Trusts and 270 schools. In doing so, we have gathered responses from 70,000 pupils across England focused on safeguarding within their schools. This blog outlines the next step in the process – analysis of the Safeguarding Survey results.

To guarantee that the follow-up review is as impactful as possible for all parties involved, we ensured that schools and trusts could take part regardless of budget, offering the survey for free for a limited time.

What Are the Main Reasons for Doing a Safeguarding Survey?

The survey reviews the effectiveness of school and trust safeguarding policies to understand whether pupils feel safe in various settings and whether their school has prepared them for what to do if they do not. We developed this survey in partnership with a group of experts ranging from trust-safeguarding leads to safeguarding audit specialists and research experts.

The survey has two overarching goals: quality assurance of safeguarding practices and gathering evidence for action.

• QUALITY ASSURANCE | Assess whether policies, practices and curriculum are having the required impact.
• EVIDENCE FOR ACTION | Identify issues before it’s too late, and dedicate resources to the most impactful areas.

Educators have a moral and legal duty to protect pupils, so it’s essential to understand whether pupils feel safe and know what to do if they don’t feel safe. The main benefits of doing the survey may vary from trust to trust or between roles. Within this blog, we are going to take a look from all perspectives at how we can make the most of the data collected and turn data into action points to plan school development.

Are You Ready to Analyse Your Safeguarding Survey Results? Explore Your Options!

The Edurio platform allows trusts and schools to administer and analyse feedback surveys from students, parents, teachers, governors and trustees to improve education quality continuously. Over the following two sections of this blog, we will look at the analysis tools accessible to you depending on the type of survey your school has conducted: free or paid.

Free Survey Analysis

If you have recently taken part in our sponsored Safeguarding Survey for free, then you’re in the right place! Let’s look at the tools you can use to incorporate your Safeguarding Survey results into performance reviews.

Response Analysis

On our platform, you can view your schools’ responses to your most recent safeguarding surveying period. Feel free to explore each school’s data for each of the questions asked in the survey.

As you can see, the result analysis is available for all platform users. It shows the breakdown of responses, how many responses you have for these questions, average response, positive response percentage and any open response answers.

This analysis can be used to explore perceptions and paint a picture of what students are experiencing concerning policies and procedures and how they’re enforced in schools. Questions are grouped into sections, and each section can be explored independently.

Executive Summaries

The Executive Summaries are a great way of overseeing your organisation’s main findings. They highlight the areas within your Safeguarding Survey results that need addressing soonest and the areas to reflect on. This offers a more overview approach to looking at the individual question responses. The module summary offers a quick, easy-to-consume breakdown of modules, listing them from most to least positive.

As well as the module summary, the executive summary includes your three strongest results (highest positive percentage questions) and your three worst results (lowest positive response percentages). This makes the areas of success and development easily readable and understandable for all staff members.

Schools are unique and have different needs. As a result, in our work with trusts, we’ve found that allowing leaders of individual schools to engage with their results often provides a better outcome. As a Trust leader, you can guide them and set the overall principles, but most importantly, you must understand what is relevant to them first.

Paid Survey Analysis

If you have recently purchased and taken part in our Safeguarding Survey or are considering upgrading your account to include full-service features, this is for you! Let’s explore the best ways you can incorporate the Safeguarding Survey results into your reviews.

Benchmarks

As a Premium user, you have access to our nationwide benchmarks; this feature can assist you in understanding how your organisation is doing for each section and question and how that compares to other schools or Trusts across the country.

As seen in the example, you will also be able to track progress of your Safeguarding Survey results over time by repeating the survey over multiple years, identifying issues to focus on and then assessing how your actions have improved pupils’ safeguarding experiences within your school/Trust. Whilst this feature won’t be available just yet, as you have only done the survey once, it will be there if you repeat the survey in future.

Contextualising Results

Results to a single question alone don’t tell us much – it’s only when these results are analysed in the context that you begin to understand the whole picture. When wanting to understand your results in context, it’s worth looking at the results of each question across a broader set of topics or comparing results against comparable groups such as other years within the school, other schools, or the same cohort at a different point in time.

You can do this by using the filter function to filter your results to look at findings from specific schools or year groups.

Downloads

Having downloadable and printable reports is a feature that can be useful for school and Trust leaders. Collecting evidence throughout the school year is often done in multiple ways. Having a hard copy or collecting everything in digital folders can come in handy in different situations.

These downloadable PDF documents can include the executive summaries, dashboards of selected modules and question responses (including benchmarking where relevant), the matrix view and even open-answer word clouds.

These documents can act as a great way to engage your staff in the next steps. In order to have full cooperation and investment from your staff, it’s best to involve them in the action-taking process, which occurs after the initial phase of analysing the survey’s results.

From feedback and conversations with our customers, we have often seen that it is not enough for central trust teams to provide schools with development plans but to allow school representatives the opportunity to work together. This, in turn, leads to more ownership and better interventions in areas identified as the most urgent ones within the data.

Want to Take Part? Get Involved Today!

As we have said in one of our previous Staff Wellbeing blogs, “How to Use Your Survey to Support Strategy”, the real work begins when the survey ends. Edurio often helps to facilitate idea-sharing sessions between trusts at our roundtable events, where trusts can share ideas with other trusts and add to the communal discussion about best practise.

• ARE YOU NEW HERE? If your school or Trust has yet to take part in the Edurio Pupil Safeguarding Survey, we encourage you to schedule a call with our Sales team here. They will help you find the best tools to analyse your safeguarding efforts.
• WOULD YOU LIKE TO ACCESS THE FULL FEATURES? Explore more and get the most of your Safeguarding Survey results by upgrading here.