The
Engagement Platform
Providing school and trust leaders with actionable employee engagement data.
· Understand what motivates your school employees
· Access essential metrics for your school improvement strategy
· Boost retention and improve recruitment
Employee engagement is a sustained practice providing leaders with key metrics throughout the academic year. It gives all managers ownership of their data for the teams they lead, sharing responsibility for school culture. Strong employee engagement drives better retention, higher job satisfaction and a sustainable work environment.
The Engagement Platform (TEP) makes gathering, interpreting, and comparing employee engagement data intuitive by automatically identifying trends, bright spots and attrition risks to make action planning easy.
Joining TEP means joining a community of like-minded school and trust leaders who are committed to thinking differently about the future of our sector, with data at the heart of decision making.
Employee engagement is more than just a survey.
Providing leaders with actionable data
TEP uses the largest standardised question set designed to understand school staff and teacher engagement and the drivers that sit behind it. All administered, reported and benchmarked through an easy to use digital platform and community of practice.
Evidence-led
Designed by our research unit and utilising the best practice in employee engagement. Results are contextually benchmarked to provide a true reflection of teacher engagement. Shared through a headline engagement score and 11 drivers of engagement. TEP APC scoring presents a unique view of your results to provide thorough context to understand your data.
Simple to use
Data is automatically collected from your team through census-style windows across the academic year. Choose from 6 data collection windows to take part in. Track and monitor live responses. Automated report generation for trust leaders, SLT or school governors.
Actionable insights
Data is broken down by engagement driver, demographics and other groupings - helping you to direct action and support. Supported by the TEP school community, providing sustainable practices supporting engagement, retention and satisfaction.
Benchmarks in action
TEP provides robust and meaningful benchmarking. We ask all schools the same questions, in the same time frames so schools can be confident they are comparing like for like. Data breakdowns and benchmarking for specific groups provide support for action planning.
Leadership and Management
School score
Benchmark
Scoring lowest in Humanities and early career teachers.
Put proactive support in place for early career teachers and humanities line managers
Leadership and Management
School score
Benchmark
Scoring lowest in Humanities and early career teachers.
Put proactive support in place for early career teachers and humanities line managers
Leadership and Management
School score
Benchmark
Scoring lowest in Humanities and early career teachers.
Put proactive support in place for early career teachers and humanities line managers
What our partners say
Making a difference
“Being part of the TEP Community and a pilot school has helped our leadership team focus on sustaining actions that make a positive difference to our team”
Sally Garrett
Headteacher, The Ashley School
What our partners say
A great asset
“The TEP team has been invaluable in supporting the analysis process so we could drill down into the data and make informed choices, using an evidence based approach”
Toby Sutherland
Headteacher, St Clement Danes School
Our research
TEP data is a key part of our decision making
"We’ve had a great experience partnering with TEP. Throughout the pilot it’s been simple to use and easy to engage our staff with. We really appreciate the thoughtful and pragmatic approach, rooted in research and the genuine desire to build the service shaped around the needs of school leaders like me. TEP data is now a key part of our decision-making process as we strive to build an outstanding working environment for our teachers and school staff. "
Alison Tones
Headteacher at Rufford Primary and Nursery School, Nottingham
The TEP cycle
Get beyond the annual staff survey. TEP supports schools to take part in a meaningful cycle of feedback and action throughout the academic year, supporting within year and longer term strategy.
Collect data
Automatically collect responses from your team via the platform in half-termly census windows.
Access support resources and live tracking to secure high response rates from your team.
Individuals remain anonymous with data redacted for small groups.
Share and act
Respond to anonymous comments directly through the platform. Resources provided for leadership teams to review data and plan dissemination to their teams.
TEP provides trend insights and case studies from the TEP community, sharing sustainable practice across the sector.
Download tailored reports for trustees, governors, Ofsted, leadership teams and all staff.
Action plan
Data automatically populates your TEP dashboard, highlighting headline score and overall trends.
Compare your scores to the benchmarks, pinpointing areas to celebrate success or direct action.
Leaders can analyse data by department, experience, or role, providing actionable insight.
A unique approach
TEP draws on best practices in employee engagement from other sectors while grounding its approach in the unique experience of teaching and the school sector.
Headline engagement Score
A headline score captures overall staff engagement. By subscribing to TEP schools gain access to a metric tailored for the education sector and collected at scale. The APC scoring method groups staff members into “advocates”, “passives” and “challengers”. TEP calculates a score between -100 and 100, giving you a nuanced headline to track over time.
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Engagement Drivers
11 engagement drivers indicate the experience of your team across individual factors, the unique nature of the work teachers do and the dig into the complexities of the school environment. Each driver and underlying question is scored using APC, providing mean and net scores, and a distribution for each measure.
Benchmarking
TEP provides robust and meaningful benchmarking. We ask all schools the same questions, in the same time frames so schools can be confident they are comparing like for like. Data breakdowns and benchmarking for specific groups provide support for action planning.
Partner contributions
We want to make our methodology available to all schools and subsidise our platform through a central grant, supported by ImpactEd. Tiny schools, please get in touch to discuss an accessible option for your budget. Multi-academy trust options available to view all your schools in one.
£750/year
Up to 6 collection windows
Onboarding and data review support
Primary specific benchmarks and breakdowns
Access to TEP community resources and case studies
Partner support team
£1,300/year
Up to 6 collection windows
Onboarding and data review support
Secondary specific benchmarks and breakdowns
Access to TEP community resources and case studies
Partner support team
Any last questions?
Drop us a line with any questions you have.
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.
Become a TEP founding partner
Join the TEP school community to access reliable data, robust benchmarking and actionable insights to improve teacher engagement.
