To ask headteachers

[Rhiannon93]

Hi all, posted here for traffic.

I’m doing my dissertation this year for a primary education degree and I need to get in contact with headteachers who are willing to have their teachers participate.

It’s just an online survey for teachers but I need permission from the head first to send it out. I was wondering if anybody knew how to get in touch with a large amount of primary headteachers online at once please? I’ve tried about 10 local schools but I’m doing a lot of chasing and not getting a response. If anything I’d like to almost put an ad out to headteachers and they can approach if they’d be interested .

Does anyone have any ideas?

You could approach a MAT? See if they would be willing to share with their schools.

Join The Two Mr P’s page on FB, that’s very active!

As a teacher, I’ve taken surveys for students that have been posted to that page.

Ask your supervisor - this must come up every year. They may have contacts or they may know good ways of getting contacts.

Thank you. As part of my ethics approval I actually need approval from the headteacher first before I can have teachers participate. Are you a headteacher and gave permission?

@Rhiannon93 No, I’m not but there will be Heads on that page so if you put a post on there, hopefully some will reach out to you.

I'm not a head, but I've worked with schools for a decade, including trying to get responses from heads. It's REALLY difficult - they're v v busy and need to prioritise, so I totally understand why. So the mechanics of this sound tricky. I echo pp who suggested trying to go through the central team if some of the big MATs. Or maybe you could try to get one of the leadership unions on side to send things to lots of heads. But I think you need to think from their perspective of why they should want to get their staff involved - what's the ultimate benefit of your research to the sector etc, and really sell it to them.

Why do you need the approval of the head? What are you asking them to do? Something involving their school? Pupils? It sounds like something that will take up a significant amount of time which people are much less likely to get on board with as (brutally) an undergrad dissertation will hold no benefit for them.

Ask your supervisor what happens usually and how they fix it. Or, and I suspect this will ultimately be easier, change your dissertation to something that doesn’t require the approval of the head for teachers to take part.

I’ve just read your thing again and it says it’s just an online survey. If it’s completely anonymous I don’t understand why you need the permission of the head?

I recently surveyed teachers for a Master's thesis. I could EITHER survey teachers in one school, for which I needed the headteacher's permission, OR it could be completely anonymous via facebook groups for teachers, which didn't require any headteachers' permission. Are you sure this isn't the case for your assignment?

Hi, thanks for this. I wasn’t aware of that. When I was doing my ethics approval it said that if participants are part of an organisation (school) then I need permission from the headteacher. Maybe I’m making it harder for myself than it should be…

Yes, if you are surveying teachers at one specific school, then you need the headteacher's permission because your assignment will be written about practice in that particular school. Whereas, if you're surveying anonymous teachers from the internet, your assignment is not related to one specific organisation.

Try #EduTwitter

As part of my research the participants need to do two rounds of surveys spaced 2 weeks apart. Just thinking that if I did it randomly then I wouldn’t be able to contact the participants for the second round and ensure I get the responses. I’ve managed to get two more schools though!