Survey to get children’s views on school issues

CHILDREN as young as nine will be asked about how their schools deal with bullying and what they think of their teachers from next month.

Department of Education inspectors are to survey pupils from the coming school year for the first time, as part of the whole-school evaluation (WSE) process which already includes input from parents’ councils.

The wider parent body in each school will also be given confidential questionnaires, seeking their views on school management, discipline, teachers and facilities.

The initiative announced in June by Education Minister Mary Coughlan is designed to widen the scope of WSE inspections, which were carried out at around 200 primary and second level schools in the past year.

A trial expansion of the inspection system at 12 second level schools since last autumn also involved student and parental questionnaires, and may be extended nationwide.

The primary initiative will involve the issuing of the survey forms to all pupils from third class to fifth class in smaller schools and “a large sample” of children in these classes at medium and larger schools.

The questions they are likely to be asked, from a sample questionnaire seen by the Irish Examiner, will be in the form of a series of statements to which they have the choice of answering: “Yes”, “No” or “Not sure”. They include:

* I like coming to school.

* The children behave well in my school.

* I feel safe in my class and in the playground.

* Everyone is treated fairly in the school.

* Teachers talk to us about dealing with bullying.

* I can talk to a teacher if I am upset about something in school.

* My lessons are interesting.

* My teacher explains things clearly in my lessons.

* I think I am doing well at reading.

Around 20 to 30 questions will be asked of pupils and parents, with families being sent the questionnaires to their homes for return to inspectors in sealed envelopes.

As well as English and Irish versions, the questions will also be posed in Polish, Lithuanian and some other languages.

The kind of statements to be put to parents, will have a choice of responses, either “agree” or “strongly agree”, “disagree” or “strongly disagree” or “not sure”. They are to be asked, for example, if they think their child’s school is well run, whether it deals well with bullying, if the child’s social and personal development is helped by the school, whether they trust the school to deal fairly with complaints, and if they believe teaching is good in the school.

All the questionnaires will be anonymous and the overall statistics will be given to inspectors after they are read by a machine, with the same aggregate data available to schools if they want it for self-evaluation purposes.

Ms Coughlan said last month the move to include more parental and pupil views will add to the robustness of the WSE process.

According to her spokesperson, the questionnaires will ensure the views of much larger numbers of parents and students are listened to when the work of schools is being evaluated.

Since they have been publicly available in 2006, WSE reports on more than 1,000 of the country’s 4,000 schools have been placed on the Department of Education website: www.education.ie