Education survey question bank

Who is answering, and what they can see

The ten banks divide by respondent. Students answer about teaching, workload, assessment and the parts of a course that did not land, and they answer very differently depending on whether marks are still outstanding. Parents answer about communication, safety, homework and how welcome they feel, and they are the group most likely to answer at length in an open question. Teachers and staff answer about workload, resourcing and leadership, which overlaps with the employee banks but carries its own vocabulary. Each group can only report what it observes, so a question aimed at the wrong group returns opinion rather than evidence.

Timing decides the answer more than wording does

Course evaluations run before results are released, or the marks colour everything. Workshop feedback goes out inside a day, while the detail is still recoverable. A needs assessment runs at the start of a unit, not the end, because its whole purpose is to change what happens next. Graduate outcomes surveys run months after finishing, which is why they need contact details collected up front and a short, patient form at the far end. School climate surveys run annually and are worth repeating with identical wording, since the year on year movement is the finding.

Keeping the questions fair

Any survey about a named teacher invites a popularity answer unless the questions stay on observable behaviour: whether feedback arrived in time, whether the assessment matched what was taught, whether instructions were clear. Every bank here is written that way. Each page opens with a recommended question count and the three never to skip, then groups the rest into sections so a five minute version is a matter of dropping sections. Demographic questions stay optional, and on small cohorts they are worth cutting entirely, because a class of twelve is not anonymous once two of them are answered.

Every page in this collection

• Course evaluation questions for the end of term

  An end of course evaluation has to separate what was taught from who taught it and from how it was assessed, because those three are fixed by three different people. These questions keep them in separate blocks and leave only two open answers.

• Graduate survey questions for six months after finishing

  A graduate survey has one job, which is finding out what people are doing now and whether the qualification had anything to do with it. Everything else, the salary question included, is optional and should be written as though it is.

• Library survey questions for members and visitors

  A library survey has to hear from the person who comes in for the wifi as clearly as from the person who borrows forty books a year, and those two will not answer the same questions. These ask what was used before asking how good it was.

• Online learning survey questions about platform and pace

  An online course fails in two quite different places, the platform and the pace, and a single satisfaction score cannot tell you which one happened. These questions separate them and then ask the completion question most surveys carefully avoid.

• Parent survey questions for a school

  A parent survey has to work for a family answering it on a phone in the pickup queue, which rules out most of what a school would like to ask. These questions cover communication, how the child seems, homework and school life, and they name nobody.

• Scholarship application questions for a selection round

  A scholarship application has to prove three things before anyone reads an essay: the applicant is eligible, the money would change something real, and the claims can be checked. These questions put eligibility first and keep the written answers to the few a panel can compare side by side.

• School climate survey questions for students

  A school climate survey asks students what the place is actually like, in words a twelve year old reads the same way an eighteen year old does. Safety is asked place by place rather than in general, because that is how it is experienced.

• Student needs assessment questions for week one

  A week one survey exists to save the first lesson from being spent on discovery, which is the most expensive hour of the year. These questions ask how a student learns, what is actually available at home, and what they are worried about.

• Student satisfaction survey questions, grouped by service

  A single satisfaction score for a college cannot be acted on by anybody, because no one person owns teaching, the library, enrolment and the counselling service. These questions split the institution into the teams that run it and rate each one separately.

• Teacher survey questions about workload and support

  A teaching staff survey is only worth running if it finds out where the hours go, because everything else a school could ask is downstream of that. These questions count the hours, split them by task, and then ask what would give some of them back.

• Workshop feedback questions across eight screens

  A two hour workshop earns a two minute survey, and anything longer will be abandoned by the people whose opinion you most wanted. These questions cover whether the session matched its listing, how it was paced, what was useful and what to run next.