Understanding parents' needs and concerns is essential for enhancing the quality of education. When crafting parent survey questions for school improvement, you're not just gathering opinions but building a bridge between the school and its community.
In this blog post, we’ll provide effective parent survey questions that ensure the feedback you receive is relevant, actionable, and reflective of your educational community's true needs. Ready? Let’s get going!
Benefits of surveying parents for your school
Yes, students are the most important, but here’s why it’s worth your time to check in with parents from time to time.
Anticipate concerns from parents
Anticipating concerns is a proactive strategy. By understanding parents' concerns in advance, your school can address potential issues before they escalate or even arise. Also, finding effective solutions and putting in place systems takes time. Staying ahead of the curve gives you that time.
For example, if parents are worried about school safety, knowing this in advance gives you the time to take appropriate actions, such as enhancing security measures or implementing safety drills.
Moreover, this way, you can tailor your communication strategies. Instead of reacting to issues as they arise, you can proactively share information and updates that address common worries, reducing misunderstandings and building parents’ confidence in the school's leadership.
Get insight into the needs of students
While surveying students is a great idea, surveying parents can sometimes reveal insights into students' needs that may not fully emerge in the school environment.
This is because parents often have a unique perspective on their children's strengths, needs, and aspirations, which makes their input crucial for identifying areas where students may require additional support.
Moreover, parents are in a position to offer more insights into external factors that may affect children’s learning and behavior in school. For instance, family dynamics, health issues, and other circumstances may affect a child’s performance at school.
These considerations make surveying parents critical in conjunction with surveying your students at school. Here are the best survey questions if you’re considering creating a student survey questionnaire as well.
Help your parents feel involved in the classroom
It’s important to have a collaborative bond between the schools and the home environment to maintain consistency, continuity, and learning momentum. Surveying parents will make them feel more involved and tighten this bond.
When you show parents that their perspectives are valued and their contributions can directly affect their children’s learning outcomes, they are more likely to become active participants.
This means they’ll be more likely to engage in classroom-related activities, such as volunteering, attending parent-teacher conferences, and participating in school events.
8 parent engagement survey questions to improve your classroom
It’s essential that the questions you ask reveal something about the critical areas of your association with them. So, here are eight questions to include in your next parent engagement survey:
Question 1: How satisfied are you with the frequency of communication from the school?
Clear and adequate communication is critical for maintaining engagement and trust. To gather information about a particular aspect of communication, simply end the above question with ‘about your child’s progress’ or ‘about school events,’ and so on.
Add the following questions to this category to complete your assessment of parent-school communication:
- How do you prefer receiving updates from the school (e.g., email, text, newsletters)?
- Do you find the information provided by the school straightforward and easy to understand?
Question 2: How satisfied are you with the frequency of parent-teacher conferences/meetings?
If there are too few parent-teacher meetings, parents lose interest. Too many, and they start feeling put upon. Schools have to maintain a fine balance. If you’re trying to adjust or change the frequency of parent-teacher interactions in your school, a few other questions to consider may be:
- Do you feel comfortable reaching out to your child’s teacher with questions or concerns?
- Do you feel the need for quicker/additional channels of communication other than parent-teacher conferences?
Question 3: Do you feel there are enough opportunities for you to be involved in your child’s school?
Parents love being involved in their children’s education, so it becomes the school's responsibility to provide them with opportunities to do so. This question measures the level of parent involvement, which is a key indicator of engagement. Surveys tend to get elaborate, so keep these questions in a simple Yes/No, closed-ended format.
Question 4: How well do you understand the school’s curriculum?
Understanding the curriculum enables parents to align their efforts at home with the school’s educational goals, enhancing student outcomes. While you can ask it as a multiple-choice question, if you want to get granular when assessing parents' responses, you can choose the linear scale question format as well.
Another aspect worth exploring is the homework and home assignments. To gauge parent’s level of satisfaction with homework, ask:
- Are the school’s homework expectations manageable for your child?
- Do you feel that the expectations for homework are appropriate for your child’s abilities?
Question 5: Do you believe the school effectively promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion?
This is a pertinent question for today’s day and age. It assesses the school’s commitment to creating an inclusive environment where all students feel valued and respected. Understanding parents' perceptions of the school’s efforts in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion helps identify strengths and areas for improvement. This can be a simple binary (Yes/No) question.
Question 6: Do you feel your opinions are valued in the school’s decision-making process?
Parents are a critical part of the school’s community, and it’s vital that they feel that their input is valued. Ask this question to determine if parents feel like they’re a part of the school’s decision-making and governance. Another way to ask this question can be:
- Do you feel like you’re given adequate opportunities to participate in school governance (e.g., school board meetings and parent councils)?
Question 7: How safe do you feel your child is at school?
Every school needs to provide a safe and secure learning environment for students. Parents’ perceptions of safety directly impact their trust in the school and influence their overall satisfaction. As this question looks to gather perception, you should use the linear scale and aim to improve your score continuously.
Question 8: Do you have any suggestions for improving your experience as a parent at this school?
Lastly, you may want to include an open-ended question to invite subjective views and suggestions from parents. This broad question captures parents’ general sentiment and offers a place for parents to suggest areas for improvement.
Another way to phrase this question is to simply ask, ‘Would you recommend this school to other parents?’ This is because parents’ willingness to recommend the school is a strong indicator of their satisfaction and trust in the school’s quality.
Organize your survey results better with the help of Form Publisher
Making the survey is just half the job. Now that you’re all set to receive responses from the parents, you should look for solutions to help organize those responses. This is because you can only gain valuable insights if your form responses are organized.
Form Publisher is an easy solution for managing form responses. When you use this simple add-on, people’s responses get automatically stored as a form document in your preferred destination in your Google Drive as soon as someone fills out your Google Form.
Once done, you can easily sort through and retrieve your form documents whenever you want. Create your survey and make analyzing them easier with Form Publisher!