SSAT School Culture Survey 2024

This year for the first time, all SSAT member schools can take advantage of our unique School Culture Survey free of charge. It allows you to take the temperature of your school culture and gain valuable insights into strengths and development areas to inform your planning.

Register your interest

Create a school culture where your people, staff and students, can flourish.

Culture plays a key role in any successful team or organisation. A positive culture enables everyone to do their best work and achieve great things. It means creating a place where staff feel valued, supported, and connected. This leads to increased staff well-being and retention, higher job satisfaction and improved performance.

Why do the SSAT School Culture Survey?

The SSAT School Culture Survey 2024 has been carefully designed to give school leaders insight into the culture of their school community. Using the three themes of Vision, Values & Moral Purpose, Leading People and Operational Management the survey aims to get to the heart of how staff feel about the school and their role within it.

Our independent and anonymised staff survey allows you to check the “temperature” of your school. You will gain valuable insights into your school’s strengths, as well as areas for development that will inform your planning.

How does it work?

You will nominate a Culture Survey champion for your school who will be responsible for disseminating the survey to all staff, SSAT will do the rest.

We will send you:

• A personalised link to the online survey. The survey consists of 20 questions using a five-point Likert scale where participants are asked to which extent they agree with each statement, from strongly disagree to strongly agree. It should take no longer than 10 minutes to complete.
• A PowerPoint slide to use in staff meetings to explain all about the survey and provide a QR code so staff can have instant access.
• A poster to display in staff rooms with a QR code for instant access.

After the completion window has closed we will send you a summary report of the results from your school staff.

All responses are completely anonymous. SSAT completes the data analysis and the raw data is not shared with the school. Participants are asked for their role (senior leader, middle leader, teacher, support staff) and length of service (0-2 years, 2-5 years, 5-10 years, 10+ years) so that overall trends can be analysed using these metrics, however, respondents can opt out of these questions if preferred.

What will I get out of it?

You will receive a summary report that provides an overall numerical scoring for each of the questions based on the 1-5 Likert scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree), along with scoring broken down by role and length of service.

These results will give you insights into:

• Staff morale, well-being and workload
• Relationships, behaviours and collaboration
• Communication and change
• Leadership, professional learning and development.

When will it take place?

• 05 Feb – 08 March 2024: Sign up window – complete our short registration form to let us know who will be the champion for your school
• 11 March 2024: All registered schools will receive their survey link and resource pack
• 11 March – 29 March 2024: Window for survey completion. Your staff will have this three-week window to complete the survey. Analysis will begin on Monday 1 April 2024 so all submissions must be complete before then.
• Week beginning 22 April 2024: You will receive your report

How do I get involved?

Look out for an email from your relationship manager in the week beginning 5 February with a link to nominate your Culture Survey Champion.

Then look out for your survey pack to arrive by email on Monday 11 March 2024.

How do I take it further?

If you would like to take a more in-depth look at your school culture and give all stakeholders a chance to feedback to an impartial observer, we can arrange for one of our Senior Education Leads to conduct a culture audit visit to your school.

The visit agenda is designed in collaboration with you and can include:

• analysis of your survey results
• meetings with representative groups from across school staff and students
• learning walks, shadowing meetings or duties
• meeting with governors.

A full audit feedback report will be provided. Get in touch to find out more.

What will SSAT do with the survey data?

The SSAT School Culture Survey 2024 will be the first of an annual national event allowing schools to better understand their school culture. SSAT will be analysing the results on a national level to identify trends and insights that will help you benchmark your results.

Your school’s summary report will only be sent to your culture survey champion, in the form of a pdf attachment to an email. Any publication of overall survey analysis by SSAT will only refer to national or regional trends. No individual schools will be referenced in analysis.

The survey does not collect personal data on respondents. You can find our full privacy policy here.

What are schools saying about SSAT’s School Culture support?

As a school leadership team, we thought we knew about our culture and ethos but wanted independent verification.

The SSAT audit gave us this view by working with all stakeholders it enabled us to focus on the most pressing matters that were revealed by the audit and the visit.

Taking part was simple yet thought-provoking and very rewarding for all involved. The findings of the report facilitated an action plan which now forms part of our school improvement plan.

As a school, we continue to move forward in the areas that were identified.

We would recommend the SSAT audit to colleagues in other schools who are looking to identify, develop and improve the culture of their schools.

Calday Grange Grammar School

Who is it for?

Headteachers, Senior leaders and MAT Leads in all phases.