The Department of Education and the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) would like to invite your school to participate in a regional survey of Schools' perceptions of the services provided by the Education and Library Boards for Children and Young People. The survey will be undertaken for NIAO by the Audit Commission which has carried out similar surveys across English and Welsh authorities over a number of years.
The aim is to collect information on your views of the services and support provided or procured for schools by your Education and Library Board (ELB). The information is extremely important in providing an insight into the key areas that require further development and improvement, particularly with the impending establishment of the new Education and Skills Authority.
We believe this is an important opportunity to identify services that can be improved, as well as those that are performing well. The information will allow us to compare your schools’ views of services provided by your ELB with those of other schools across all five ELBs.
The information you provide will be confidential to the NIAO/ Audit Commission and your responses will be kept anonymous. This information will be a key source of feedback about the support schools receive from their ELB and will help inform the approaches to be taken under the new Education and Skills Authority.
It should only take about 20 minutes to complete.
Further guidance on responding to the questions is available from the survey website. The NI Audit Office should be your first point of contact for any general enquiries. Please contact:
Cathy Robinson
The Audit Office, 106 University Street, Belfast BT7 1EU
Tel: 028 90251055, Fax: 028 90251051
Email: cathy.robinson@niauditoffice.gov.uk
You can also contact the Audit Commission by email at:
schoolsurvey-help@audit-commission.gov.uk
Go to the school survey project website at: www.audit-commission.gov.uk/schoolsurvey and click on Enter the 2009 survey.
This will take you to the online survey welcome page, where you will be asked to enter a board number and a unique school ID. Board numbers are as follows:
| Board | Board number |
|---|---|
| Belfast | 401 |
| Western | 402 |
| North-Eastern | 403 |
| South-Eastern | 404 |
| Southern | 405 |
The school id is a unique number that will be sent to you on the day the survey opens.
Click on Enter survey. You will be presented with a few details about your school – please check these to ensure that you have entered the website with the correct login numbers.
Enter your email address and create a password. We will automatically email this to you for your records.
Click on Begin survey and you will be taken to the main survey menu of the 2009 survey.
To revisit the survey before the closing date, you just have to enter your board number, login id and your password. If you wish to leave the website and come back another time just click on Save your survey and return another time.
Please answer the questions using the scale at the top of each page of the survey.
You can also enter comments in the boxes after each section and in the further comments box at the end of the survey.
The survey can be printed in order to involve colleagues, for example, administrative staff, governors and so on, in deciding your school's response. Click on Print the survey from the left-hand menu and a 'printable' version will be generated for you in a new window – click on the link to print.
It is estimated that the survey should take around 20 minutes to complete online, however, this time frame does not include time taken to gather views of other colleagues.
When your school has completed the survey, the principal should click on Sign off and submit your survey as complete from the main survey menu.
Please note: This involves telling us how you would like your response to be used. The default is to remain completely anonymous to the Education and Library Board, in which case your responses will be added into aggregated analysis and we will pass on an anonymised version of the comments you have made. However, you can choose to release further information if you wish.
