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Share What about the Edurio Equality, Diversity and Inclusion survey made you think ‘this is for us’?
We began working to develop our equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) strategy in March 2020. At that point, we had been undertaking some work related to EDI. Still, we needed data to contribute to our decision-making and evidence to help us understand our workforce’s experience. We had reached the point in our journey where we knew we wanted to make an impact quickly, but we wanted to ensure that our actions were data-driven and could be evidenced by our understanding of our workforce and their needs.
We wanted to develop an EDI Strategy and a Roadmap for the Foundation that focused on the specific needs of our organisation. We wanted to understand where to prioritise to ensure that our strategy was focused on interventions that would make a real impact on our staff. Therefore, we decided to run a series of surveys, one of which was the staff survey with Edurio.
Knowing that Edurio has undertaken work with many other multi-academy trusts and schools nationally, reassured us that they are experts in the field of stakeholder feedback, and knowing that we would be able to benchmark our results against other schools was helpful in providing a baseline. Not only that, but as we were already working with Edurio on other surveys, we knew that they have a great team – we were impressed from the first time we met them and have continued to be. In particular, the support that Madara has offered has been fantastic.
How did you find the process of working with Edurio?
It’s been excellent.
Madara was very helpful in guiding us through the process and pointing us in the right direction. She helped us decide on the best time to run the survey, and how to ensure our EDI survey complimented our wider staff engagement survey, so that the strategies we were putting in place for staff wellbeing took into account EDI and vice versa.
The platform is also really useful and user-friendly. It’s intuitive and senior leaders across our Trust can also engage easily to understand their results. The platform is clearly laid out, and provides an opportunity to compare your data to the average responses of other MATs. The platform also allows you to filter and look at specific schools or staff members with specific protected characteristics, and really drill down into the detail of the responses. The platform provides an opportunity to review both qualitative and quantitative data anonymously.
Having that large evidence base allows us to make decisions with confidence, as we see that the data is telling us we need to take action in a particular area, look at a topic in more detail, and so on. The data alone doesn’t tell us all the answers, but where it doesn’t, it helps us formulate the next steps we need to take to find those answers.
How are you using the survey to support your strategy?
The survey provided useful insight into areas where staff were feeling less confident and where we needed to focus our interventions. Also, the survey provides an opportunity for staff to provide feedback and to help us to gain a deeper understanding of the risks, issues, and developmental areas that we needed to address.
As a result of this and a number of other surveys and from holding focus groups with groups of staff, we have designed and implemented our new EDI Strategy and Action Plan. We have also built an EDI resources hub, undertaken learning and development programmes across the Foundation and have developed a number of short and longer-term strategic objectives that we are now working to progress.
We’ve got plans to make more use of the survey going forwards too. As the survey helped us to understand the experience of our staff in more detail, it also opened up some questions we wanted to investigate further. Looking at staff members with different protected characteristics, we discovered we have more questions that need exploring and we’ll be setting working groups next year to explore the experience of different groups in more detail; now we have the data, we want to understand the experience of different staff groups.
We will be looking to rerun the survey in the future, to test one dataset against the other and see how the baseline results have changed following our work on the EDI strategy.
Why would you recommend Edurio?
I’ve recommended Edurio to other organisations. The fact that they’ve built a national data set and they’re working with a lot of MATs is very useful, this is because it provides a benchmark and a sense of how your organisation compares to others. Being able to conduct a comparison of other schools results is a useful indicator of how we’re doing and the areas where we need to focus.
Edurio is a proactive organisation that’s is making good headway within the sector. Their continued growth within the sector means that the benchmarks they’re building will continue to grow and deliver more valuable insight.