Frequently Asked Questions - Wellbeing Measurement for Schools

There are two purposes:

• To help schools to review and support the wellbeing of their pupils by providing schools and their partner organisations (e.g. local authorities, associated charities) with anonymised reports of survey findings

• To carry out research into the use of wellbeing surveys in schools to support the wellbeing of pupils

Your child attends a school that has agreed to take part in this project. The parents and carers of all pupils in the relevant year group(s) are being contacted with this invitation.

Information about your child and other participating children that is already collected by your child’s school will be shared with the researchers and stored securely. The researchers will send a list of survey access codes back to the school, which will allow pupils who are taking part to access the online survey.

Your child will be invited to fill in the online survey about how they are feeling. The survey takes 15 minutes to complete on average. Here is a screenshot of the survey.

No. Taking part in the study is entirely voluntary. 

This project uses an opt-out model of consent from parents/carers. Pupils with opt-out consent from their parents/carers, can not participate in the survey. Your child's school must distribute hard copies or email our Parent Information Sheet to all parents and carers of the pupils in the participating year groups. After reading the Parent Information Sheet, parent/carers who are happy for their child to take part in the survey do not need to do anything. 

It will be made clear to all pupils when they are given access to the online survey that they do not have to answer any questions that they don’t want to, and they do not have to take part at all if they don’t want to.

Your child’s school will receive an anonymised report of the survey findings to help them review and support pupil wellbeing.

There are no known risks or disadvantages to taking part, but if you feel that something has gone wrong with the conduct of the research and you wish to make a complaint, please contact Nick Tait at nick.tait@annafreud.org. If you then feel that your complaint has not been handled to your satisfaction, you can also contact the Chair of the UCL Research Ethics Committee at ethics@ucl.ac.uk.

In this project, we want to be clear that neither the research team or the schools are attempting to identify whether an individual child’s responses indicate that they are at risk. The focus of our reports produced for participating schools is to help identify areas of strength and challenge for school year groups as a whole. For this reason, all schools are asked to make pupils aware that their answers will not be seen by school staff, and to remind pupils of who they can speak to if they want to talk about anything that has come up. This is clearly set out in our guidance to participating schools, including a crib sheet for school staff introducing the survey to pupils.

Your understanding is correct that pupils do not have to answer the questions if they do not want to. At the beginning of the survey, they are presented with a page of information about the survey and can decide whether they want to proceed. This page also explains that they are free to stop at any time, without giving a reason. Any support that may be required to support any children who may be adversely affected by having to consider these questions would be the school’s local provision, which is made clear when the schools are administering the surveys, by reminding pupils of how to share concerns and access support if they need to.

Please use the Data Template that we will share with you via email. The Data Template includes all necessary instructions to support you in completing it correctly.

After completion, please upload the password protected spreadsheet to the UCL Data Transfer Portal.

• Screenshot of WMfS Data Template  

Please see the privacy notice in the information sheet for parents and carers for details of how data is managed in accordance with GDPR. 

Please check your spam/junk mail folders. If it’s not there, please let the research team know by emailing us at measuringwellbeing@annafreud.org or call us at 020 7443 2225.

If you are sure you are using the correct username and password and it is still not letting you log in, please get in touch with us by emailing us at measuringwellbeing@annafreud.org or call us at 020 7443 2225. We will ask the technical team at UCL to issue a password reset.

This may be related to the browser you are using; older browser versions provide limited, if not no functionality with Data Safe Haven services. Please try using a different browser or different computer if possible. Preferred options are Firefox Mozilla, Google Chrome, or Internet Explorer version 11 or higher. If the upload still doesn’t work, please report it to the research team by emailing us at measuringwellbeing@annafreud.org or call us at +44 (0)20 7443 2225.

Once registered, please do not forget your login details for the portal. To access the portal please visit https://filetransfer.idhs.ucl.ac.uk and follow the steps below:

• Click on Secure Folders

• Click on the Upload Button. This will allow you to browse your documents and select the pupil data template. 

• Please note there will be a brief green 'Upload Complete' notification at the bottom of the web page. You will not receive an automated email confirmation from the UCL Data Transfer Portal. 

After uploading the Excel spreadsheet with your pupil information, we will confirm with you if it passed all the validation checks and we can move on to the actual survey implementation. 

We will send your data contact a list of pupil survey access codes. The data contact will need to phone us on 020 7443 2225 to get a temporary password to download the survey access codes for all the pupils with consent.

Your school ID is either the DfE number or URN number that was provided when completing the registration form.

The pupil ID can be anything so long as each pupil has a unique one. Other schools have used the ID used locally but it can be as simple as assigning everyone a number sequentially starting from 1. In the Pupil Template guide, the final page has a list of all the options for each column on the Pupil Data Template and what they mean.

When the pupil data template is uploaded it must include only the pupils for whom parent and carer consent has been received by the school. All columns must be filled in for all pupils with consent, except for class name, which is optional. When data is entered for a pupil, the required cells are highlighted red until they are filled in. Entries must comply with the options highlighted on Page 3 of the Pupil Template Guide. e.g. for a white British pupil, “WBRI” should be entered in the ethnicity column. “White - British” should not be entered and is only shown below for reference. Where columns include a “No” option, this must be entered to confirm an answer of “No”, rather than leaving the cell blank.

We cannot accept survey responses from pupils and staff that have been completed on paper. This is for two reasons: 1) There is clear research which shows that pupils and staff respond differently to questionnaires when they complete them on paper and when they complete them on a computer. Having a combination of the two methods of completion in a sample will add a confound into the data (make it more difficult to interpret); 2) With numerous schools participating in the project, for practical reasons we need to stick to a consistent approach. However, if you would like a copy of the pupil survey to share, you can find it here.

We recommend that schools nominate a main school contact who will liaise with us and who will be responsible for the administration of the pupil survey and/or staff survey. 

We suggest schools plan implementation of the survey in advance as various arrangements might be required, e.g. scheduling the survey period into the school’s calendar, booking IT suites or library computers.

You should expect that the survey completion will take a whole lesson. This includes time to introduce and explain the survey to the pupils, to answer any questions, and to get pupils set up on computers.

We suggest booking at least one additional lesson slot, to include any pupils that might miss their intended slot due to school absence.

Pupils will complete the survey online, so please ensure that the website housing the survey is not blocked by your school computer. You might want to add the survey link to your school’s ‘white list’. We recommend that you make it available either as a shortcut on the pupils’ desktops or as a link on a school’s Intranet. Please ensure that you test the questionnaire on an account that will be used by the pupils.

The survey link for the survey is: https://redcap.idhs.ucl.ac.uk/surveys/

Schools should also start thinking about what the children who will not be completing the survey will be doing during the session and what alternative activities might be made available for those who may complete the survey early in the allotted class/session.

Only authorised individuals in the research team who are working with schools to administer the survey will have access to pupil names and pupil ID numbers. The research team may collaborate with selected academic experts or students to analyse the anonymised data set, where such collaborations are determined to be beneficial for the purposes stated above. Pupil data will always be kept confidential and will be collected, stored and analysed using secure computer systems.

With regards to the right of access, if pupils or parents would like to know more about the categories of data about them or their child being processed, please contact the research team at measuringwellbeing@annafreud.org.

Please use the following resources to explain the survey to your pupils:

• Guidance for schools introducing pupil survey

• Pupil Survey Guidelines for School Staff - session plan

• Pupil Survey Guidelines

• Case study - How to get a good response rate  

15 minutes on average (based on the example of the three questionnaires to be used with primary and secondary schools, which are Me & My Feelings, Student Life Satisfaction Scale and Student Resilience Survey).

During our piloting phase, in which we piloted the survey with a number of schools in Oldham, on average the survey took pupils 18 minutes, with the fastest pupils completing it in 10 minutes, and the slowest in 40 minutes. Please factor in time around the survey itself, however, for preparing pupils for the survey (e.g. briefing them on what the survey is and what is expected from them, logging in, etc.). You should expect this to take up an entire lesson.

Yes. Both pupil and staff survey are forms on a web pages, so it will work fine on an iPad.  However the text might be a bit small for some pupils and staff. On iPads, the survey may work better in landscape mode (rather than portrait), so the pages aren’t so narrow and the text on each line will be slightly larger.

As always, we strongly recommend that schools try the survey out using the test passwords (test1, test2… test10) on their intended hardware, whether it’s a desktop or iPad, before going ahead with the surveys.

Have a look here to see a screenshot of the survey.

Yes, absolutely. Please provide whatever support you would normally to your pupils. Having supported pupils in understanding the question and response options, please ensure they are given plenty of space and time to select their answers privately (e.g. look away or move away).

Case Study - Using surveys to measure wellbeing in schools: How to get a good response rate.

Pupils log in using a secure access code, they do not enter any personally identifiable information. This code is unique to the child and identifies the child’s data within the data safe-haven for analysis purposes. This information is not available to individuals or schools.

Ensure that you have received the individual survey access codes for your pupils. 

Make sure that the survey access codes have been downloaded and are in the right order (you may want to book admin support to get passwords in the right class or year group order). Think ahead of time about how you are going to hand out the passwords in the survey session - some prefer to print out the pupil passwords and give them out to pupils on a piece of paper or sticker (if you choose this option, print out a master list for the survey session as well).

Once the survey period is over, the data will be analysed by our research team and we will provide schools with individual feedback reports. The feedback will go through individual schools’ data from each of the areas of the survey, including pupils’ positive wellbeing, behavioural and emotional difficulties, the presence and strength of protective factors (such as perceived support at school, home and in the community), and ability to deal with stress and manage emotions. We will benchmark schools’ own data against that of other schools to provide some sort of gauge. All feedback is at school and/or year group level to protect individual pupils’ anonymity.

The feedback to schools can usefully provide schools with a snapshot of the state of the strengths and challenges for their pupils and highlight areas to target for prevention or support. However, as the surveys can be repeated year on year, schools will also be able to see trend data (i.e. how responses from pupils in the school are changing over time) or use the data to gauge the impact of support they are providing to pupils. Eventually, schools will be able to use survey data alongside other information that they hold about their pupils (e.g. age, gender, ethnicity) to create a more nuanced picture of the psychological wellbeing and needs of their pupils.

Young people consulted in the development of Wellbeing Measurement for Schools feel that pupils should be included in discussions around the feedback, particularly to plan activities and approaches to raise awareness of strengths or difficulties the report may highlight.

Additionally, data gathered can be used to send a positive message to parents, Ofsted and governors that the school has the broader wellbeing of pupils at its core and can be used as evidence of good practice.

During your registration, your school should have decided by when they would like their pupil survey report:

• end of August (register by 10th June for surveys to be completed by the end of July)

• end of November 2023 (register by 15th September for surveys to be completed by the end of October)

• end of January 2024 (register by 1st November for surveys to be completed by the end of December)

• end of March 2024 (register by 10th January for surveys to be completed by the end of February)

• end of April 2024 (register by 15th February for surveys to be completed by the end of March)

• end of June 2024 (register by 15th April for surveys to be completed by the end of May

The information provided back to schools in the feedback reports will be at the level of the population, with the school year group being the unit of analysis. Neither the school nor teachers will see information from the wellbeing measures for individual pupils.

The project has been designed for children to be aware that their answers are confidential and will not be seen by their parents or teachers. The teachers facilitating the survey within a school will be provided with a crib sheet of information to prepare and read out to pupils before they undertake the survey. This will include letting pupils know about who they can contact if they would like to talk to anyone about how they are feeling.

The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families and the Child Outcomes Research Consortium (CORC) are involved in the design of a range of interventions to support wellbeing and resilience in school (e.g. Education for Wellbeing, Emotional Health Check). Although interventions are not built into this particular approach, we would be happy to discuss options for schools to link with other work and bespoke CORC school support. Furthermore, the webinars/guidance in this project will include signposting to relevant resources on approaches for schools to consider in light of their feedback reports (e.g. Mentally Healthy Schools website).

Resources on CORC website

Schools in Mind website

The Evidence Based Practice Unit (EBPU) is working with your school and other schools across the UK.  All staff working with children and young people at your school are being asked to complete this survey so that we can better understand staff wellbeing and staff support, as well as staff skills and confidence in supporting children and young people’s wellbeing.

The results of this survey will help us and your school to understand the wellbeing of staff at your school and some of the factors that may influence this.

As you are employed in a participating school, we are asking staff to volunteer to take part in this research project.

If you agree to take part, you will be asked a number of survey questions. The survey explores professional confidence and ability to support children and young people’s mental health and wellbeing and the wellbeing of staff at your school. 

There are no known risks or disadvantages to taking part in this questionnaire.  If any risks or disadvantages become known during the research, you will be informed straight away.

• Your school will receive an anonymised report of the survey findings to help them review and support staff wellbeing.

• It may help us to understand more about how schools can support staff and help them to support young people

If you wish to complain or have any concerns about any aspect of the way that you have been approached or treated by members of staff, please contact Nick Tait at nick.tait@annafreud.org. If you then feel that your complaint has not been handled to your satisfaction, you can also contact the Chair of the UCL Research Ethics Committee at ethics@ucl.ac.uk.

Yes, all data collected in the survey are stored in secure systems that are only accessible to authorised members of the project team.

The survey will not ask for your name, date of birth or contact details. To help us analyse the data, you will be asked to optionally provide your place of work, broad role within the school, gender, ethnicity and age group.

We take great care to report the survey results only in an anonymised form.

We will share what we find out with the school and other partners involved in the project.  We may also share it at conferences, in academic publications, reports, and through websites, social media channels, and newsletters. All data used will be completely anonymised and you will not be identified in any publication.