Actionable insights into school engagement through an easy to use platform

Yes! You don't need to be a in a MAT or large school to get the full benefit of TEP. TEP provides contextual benchmarks for all school types and takes the heavy lifting away from the process of collecting and reporting on stakeholder feedback. Take a look at some of our case studies to see how individual schools utilise TEP to the full.

We provide instant one pager summary reports to provide to an Ofsted inspector. This will take the highlights, areas of good progress and identified areas for development from the most recent census window data your school has participated in. This can provide a quick read for an inspector. You can also share with them your most recent TEP reports which will be a lot more detailed.

We have created our question sets based on the existing research and our own psychometric testing undertaken during pilot and trial phases of the project. They are fixed, schools can't choose the questions to ask, but can add 1-2 custom questions to get feedback on something specific to the school or trust. The reason we do this is to keep the question sets focused (not asking anything that is statistically meaningless) and can reduce survey fatigue. It's important to keep response rates high to make sure your results reflect the true picture of your stakeholders - being very purposeful about what we ask is crucial to doing this well.

TEP Employee engagement collects data for all school staff role types. For non-teaching, pupil facing staff, we offer a tailored routes through the question set to reflect the nature of the non-teaching roles.

Any identifiable school data is only shared with the school leaders. We will collect case studies and banks of effective actions from schools with their express permission to share across the TEP community.

We will only share individual school data with their multi-academy trust if there is an explicit agreement in place with the central trust for MAT platform access and reporting.

No individual teacher data will be shared with school leaders. All data is presented in groups of three of more to protect anonymity.

The question set has been designed following an evidence review conducted and peer review by Dr Neil Gilbride and Dr Sam Carr, of Universities of Gloucestershire and Bath. The majority of the question set is composed of items from previously validated and open-access surveys, such as the Engaged Teacher Scale. We haven’t re-invented the wheel when strong measures already exist. Our expertise is in mobilising this research so that it reaches schools.

These sit alongside a selection of originally composed questions to tackle factors affecting engagement underrepresented in the literature. It comprises 15 distinct engagement drivers, linked to factors affecting engagement: namely the nature of work, the school environment and individual factors. It has been tested with over 100 schools and 4,500 teachers for ease of comprehension, accessibility and practicality of implementation.

We have now completed the TEP pilot and will be using the research findings to further refine the question set within the Foundation Year ahead of validating the whole question set.

The power in the benchmarks comes from schools answering the same questions at the same time. Schools cannot edit the standardised question set, but can add a small number of custom questions.

While we would not recommend using the Ofsted questions as a holistic measure of engagement, TEP partner schools report that the question set is useful to address questions 4 (involvement in shaping initiatives from the senior leadership team) and 5 (teacher safety). TEP reports can of course be shared alongside other evidence to relevant stakeholders.

We have lots of exciting features coming up in the TEP pipeline. These will provide even more support for leaders to utilise engagement data and share it effectively with their teams.

First up we’ll be adding a rotation feature to the question set to shorten completion time and reduce survey fatigue. We’ll also be enabling leaders to reply directly to anonymous comments from their teams, supporting a positive feedback loop.

We’ll release these and more in beta format to test with our TEP community. We regularly conduct user testing and source feedback from TEP partner schools to ensure the platform does what you need it to.