Not enough parents using Ofsted's Parent View

[rubyextravagance]

I have been looking on ofsted's parent view site. You can fill out a questionnaire on your child's school. Once they have enough responses anyone searching the site can see the graphs / stats produced showing the percentage of different responses (strongly agree, agree, disagree etc). I think this is really useful, especially for people choosing a school for their child who want to get a feel for what is going on when the inspectors aren't around. Unfortunately a large number of schools don't have enough survey responses to show any data, especially primary and rural schools.
The responses are only valid for 1 school year, which makes sense as schools can change quickly with new staff etc.

I think it would be great if more people popped to the site and gave their schools a review.

parentview.ofsted.gov.uk/

Oh wow, I never knew about that. Off to have a look

I agree ruby. I looked at this site when choosing primary schools for my dd and only 1 of them had enough responses.

Is it anonymous?

It pisses me off. Last Ofsted inspection we were asked to fill it in on the Parent View website. out of 344 possible replies the school only got 44. Useless.

It is anonymous IIRC.

Ofsted asked our parents to fill it in. We had about 50% who did, and the inspectors were gobsmacked. They said it was an unprecedented response, in their experience.

Which doesn't say a lot for the usual take-up on ParentView!

And yes, totally anonymous.

We were asked to fill it out by ofsted, by a deadline less than 24 hours later which I was unimpressed by. Out school has enough to be graphed but not an overwhelming response.

I had heard of it before the schools Ofsted last year and had filled it in then (think there were about 2 replies then). Now up to 50 out of about 250 on roll.

I didn't like the fact there was no where to put actual comments of your own - when the school had its ofsted I was expecting to have a questionnaire to fill in but only this. I don't find it particularly useful tbh

Have just seen you can look at results for this year, previous year or total responses.

I agree with little ducks we were given 24-48 hours to give our view of the school.

I simply was doing other things that evening.

YY to not getting much time to do it. Not great.

We had 24 hours or possibly less to complete it when it was the Ofsted inspection

Just checked and we got an email at 3:45pm and were asked to give our replies by 11am the next day. Although they would look at any received during the inspection ie until 3:20 the day after that. So 48 hours at the very most to fill it in.

Although TBF it doesn't take long to complete.

We recieved our form yesterday at the end of school to be filled in by 11am this morning. Ofsted are inspecting today.

Its certainly been an eye opener looking at the results this morning concerning bullying and behaviour. All of my concerns have been brushed off as one offs but thats not the case according to the parent survey so i can address the issue again.

Its a shame only 30% have filled it in.

Oooo, I love surveys. I'll take a look.

I have used it during the Ofsted inspections for both my DS's schools. The problem is, it is only open for a limited time (something like two days) and the questions are very limiting. There is nowhere to put anything other than standard answers to very specific questions.

thesmallprint the survey is permanently open, accessible from the Ofsted website and can be completed at any time. People complaining about the short timescales are referring to notice given before an Ofsted inspection. Because schools receive such short notice of inspections nowadays it is impossible to give more notice to parents inviting responses before an inspection.

There was a duplicate thread running about this and I commented there that I think this system is open to abuse. There are no checks on who completes the survey and in theory one person could complete the survey several times using different email addresses. I think it is also far more likely to be completed by parents who have a complaint whereas people who are happy with the school don't have the same impetus to complete it.

We were definitely told it had to be completed by a certain time on the following day to tie in with the inspections.

With regards to the two that I filled in, one of our schools is fabulous and I wanted to make sure they knew that and the other is good but could do with improvement in some areas.

I haven't gone back and checked but is the general, open all year one the same sort of restricted questionnaire?

My concern with it is that I suspect typically (except when pushed just before an Ofsted, they are permanently open as far as I'm aware) that people go on when they've a point to be made, usually a negative one.

If there's 500 responses and 10 go on with an agenda, then it won't really show. If there's only 20 responses and 5 go on with an agenda, then it can make a school look bad.

There's also no way of confirming that you do have a dc at the school (not sure how they'd work that one), so potentially you could have a set of parents at one school deliberately going to try and wreck a rival.

And for people that think that would never happen, I've been amazed at the vileness I've heard directed at one local school which recently got an outstanding, from another local school's parents (and staff and governors too, I've heard this from several angles)-and they don't even have a overlapping catchment area, I wouldn't have thought one would effect the others at all.

The fact that most parents don't even know it exists makes it pointless.

Thesmallprint yes, it's exactly the same survey which you fill in for OFSTED which is permanently on Parentview. The idea of the questionnaire is that you can give your views at any time rather than having to wait for the OFSTED inspection. Of course, because no-one knows it is there, what usually happens is that there are about three responses all year and then the night before OFSTED that shoots up to 60!