Stakeholder Feedback Hub

How do we start analysing the survey results?

Start with a broad overview of the data you have. Looking through the entire data set, rather than immediately focusing on details will allow you to identify important patterns in the feedback and get a better understanding of your situation. The visual summary and accessibility of the results will depend on the survey platform you are working with. You may be someone who loves working with raw data and will export everything into a spreadsheet to start crunching numbers. Or, you may need to get your best data guru to help you. Possibly, you’re working with a platform that provides results visualisation.

No matter how comfortable you feel working with the results, start with an overview, looking at the bigger picture from which you can decide which direction to take when exploring the data in-depth.

As you go through the results, ask yourself these questions:

Whether or not you are an optimist, don’t forget to highlight the positive results. This is a great way to celebrate what is working well in your school or trust. However, as you are just starting to explore the results and what they mean, note any questions or ideas about why these results are the way they are. What might you know or want to find out about the processes in place that would lead respondents to answer positively about these areas? Consider if there are specific respondent groups with higher results all around and ask yourself why that could be. You have identified the positive aspects, but let’s hold off still on rushing to conclusions about why they are so.

It’s not always easy to face areas of weakness, but if we ignore them, there is no opportunity for growth. When looking through your results, take note of the areas that are the weakest or the groups that show the lowest results. Keeping an open mind, try not to jump to conclusions or explanations yet. Instead, note questions that will help guide your exploration of these results as you try to come to the root cause of why respondents responded that way. Working with a critical mind, do your best not to take the results personally and imagine viewing things from the outside to distance yourself from any biases you may have.

If at any point you find yourself saying, “Oh, I wasn’t expecting that!” or feeling surprised by any of the results in your survey, note these questions down- whether the surprise is positive or negative. Perhaps you were expecting results in a certain area to be better or worse than they seem to be – these might be clues to areas where there is misalignment or misunderstanding among stakeholders and leadership. Make sure to discuss these questions later to see if other people on your team were equally surprised, or if they have any input on how things are.

If you included open response questions in your survey, decide how you want to go about analysing what people wrote. Open response questions allow respondents to provide free-form answers, which can result in a large amount of unstructured data that is difficult to analyse. These responses can add insightful nuance to the numeric scores of the rest of the survey, by giving clarity on how respondents understood questions, or by sharing examples of their specific experiences. Most significantly, open text answers let you hear the voice of your respondents – how they think about things and the language they use to think about these things. There are a few ways you can go about analysing the texts.

Once you have explored the results of all questions and categorised the strengths and weaknesses of the results, you can start putting together an idea of which question results will be most important in guiding your next steps.

Compare what you see against your goal. Did the questions you identified as most important when designing your survey provide the information you needed to achieve your goal? These might include any questions that had disturbingly negative results that caught you off guard. Or, if you found positive confirmation in your results about a topic, these might be the most important to use for communicating going forward.

For example, with a health and wellbeing survey, if your goal was to improve the health and wellbeing of pupils, look to which year group rate themselves healthiest, and which rate themselves as feeling most unhealthy.

There are various ways to implement a collaborative team approach to analysing your survey results. First, you may want a smaller group of the leadership team to explore the results together. This will give you a sense of the leadership’s perspective. You may also want to create a more mixed team to look at the results, which will give you a broader range of perspectives and input when analysing the data. Leadership, middle leaders, and teachers may have quite different takes on what they see in the results and together you may be able to fill in any blanks more quickly.

Check back on your goal – WHY WHAT WHO

Although we hope you have been reminding yourself of the goal you set at the beginning of this process, if you have let it slip aside, now is the time to bring it to the forefront once again. Checking back to what you initially set out to find out about the topic and stakeholders, as well as why you decided to go in this direction in the first place, needs to be compared to what you now know. After analysing the results and considering other data points to explore, you can now confirm or deny your previous perceptions on this topic.

Finish your analysis by considering who would benefit from seeing what data, so that the communication of your results, which we’ll cover in the next chapter, is focused and actionable.

Change agent: Someone who is taking the time to study and guide the successful process.

SLT/Exec Representative: Senior Leadership Team, Executive Team. Depending on the structure of your school or multi-academy or single-academy trust, the leadership team structure may differ.

Stakeholder Representative: Staff, parent or pupil representing the group for your project