THE SCHOOL SURVEY, 2007

Norfolk is working with the Audit Commission and Ofsted on the sixth national online School Survey in summer 2007.

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 Norfolk. This includes the whole council, not just Children's Services. It is also to gain your views on the services provided locally for children and young people.

I believe this is an important opportunity to identify services which can be improved as well as those which are performing well. The information is intended to help the council's process of self-evaluation, but it will also be used for future Joint Area Review and Annual Performance Assessment inspections of Norfolk and will allow us to compare our schools' views of our services with those of schools in other councils. I hope that combining the needs of several stakeholders in this way will help to reduce the number of surveys schools are asked to fill in.

The information you provide will be confidential to the Audit Commission. Unless you give permission for your school to be identified to us, your responses will be kept anonymous and we will receive only aggregated information on our schools' views from the Audit Commission as well as anonymised comments. This information will be a key source of feedback about our support for schools and will be taken into account in reviewing our services this year.

When and how to contribute

The survey will be open for six weeks from 4 June to 13 July 2007. During this time it will be available on the Audit Commission website. You will be able to access the survey from any computer using your LEA 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 Janine Birt or email School Survey Help for advice. A step-by-step guide to logging-in and completing the survey follows.

The results will be available to us in the autumn term 2007, after which we will report back to schools.

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

The 2007 School Survey: Guide for schools

This survey is being made available to schools in most councils in England and Wales to ask for your views on the support you receive from your council; and the services provided locally for your pupils.

The survey will be open from: Monday 4 June until Friday 13 July 2007.

It will be available online on the Audit Commission Website.

How to complete the survey

1 Log-in

• Go to the school survey project website.


• Click on Enter the 2007 survey.


• This will take you to the online survey welcome page, where you should enter your LEA and school establishment numbers (for example, 123 then 4567) 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 2007 survey.

To revisit the survey before the closing date, you just have to enter your LEA and school establishment numbers and your password. If you wish to leave the website and come back another time just click on

2 Respond to the questions

The questions in the survey are grouped in subject sections, most of which are available to all schools in all councils. There may also be a section of questions proposed by your own council. Each question should be answered using one of the six possible responses that appear: (1) Very good (2) Good (3) Satisfactory (4) Poor (5) Very poor or (X) Unable to comment.

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, for example, administrative staff, governors, your SENCO and so on, in deciding your school's response. 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 as mentioned above.

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 case your 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. Your council should be your first point of contact for any general enquiries - their details will be available by clicking on Further assistance within the website. You can also contact the Audit Commission by email.