We shouldn’t compromise on education
Every child should have the opportunity to enjoy school and grow into someone curious, confident and capable.
Schools already work hard to understand how well pupils are doing. You can measure attainment, attendance, behaviour and dozens of other outcomes, but those things don’t tell you everything about what it actually feels like to be a pupil in your school.
Educity is designed to add the experience layer, because we think that experience matters in its own right, and because schools need a better way to understand it.
Experience shapes what education becomes
Two pupils can sit in the same classroom, follow the same curriculum and receive the same teaching while experiencing school very differently. One might feel confident, connected and supported. Another might feel uncertain, overlooked or unable to participate fully.
Those differences matter. They can affect how pupils engage with learning, how they see themselves, how they relate to other people and what they believe they’re capable of becoming.
That’s why we don’t think educational experience should be treated as something soft or secondary. If it matters to the development of a child, it deserves to be understood properly.
Listening should lead to understanding
Most schools already listen to pupils, parents and staff in some form. The problem isn’t that nobody has thought of running a survey before. The harder question is whether the survey gives you something you can actually make sense of afterwards. A collection of reasonable-sounding questions can still leave you with disconnected scores and no clear way of understanding what they add up to.
So we started somewhere else. Before building the survey, we asked what we would actually need to understand before we could reasonably say that we understood educational experience. That work became the Educity Lens.
Experience belongs to the people living it
If you want to understand school experience, you have to listen to the people closest to it. That starts with pupils. They’re the people actually living the experience Educity is designed to understand, so their voice remains central.
Parents and carers add another perspective through what they see in their child and their relationship with the school. Staff bring a different view again, from the people working with pupils and helping shape the environment around them.
Those perspectives won’t always agree. Sometimes the gap between what pupils tell you and what adults believe pupils are experiencing is one of the most useful things you can find.
Better evidence, not automatic answers
Educity isn’t designed to tell you how to run your school. A survey can show you a pattern; it can tell you that one group appears to experience something differently from another; it can show you that pupils and adults see the same issue in very different ways.
What it usually can’t tell you is exactly why that pattern exists, and it certainly can’t know your school’s context better than you do.
Our goal is to give you better evidence so you can ask better questions, test assumptions and decide where your attention is most useful.
Giving people a voice with a process they can trust
Asking someone to share their experience creates a responsibility. People should understand what they’re being asked, why they’re being asked it and what will happen to their answers. If we want people to use their voice honestly, they need to be able to trust the way we listen.
Educity Open is designed so that individual respondents can’t be identified from the results your school receives. Respondents don’t create individual survey accounts, and schools don’t receive raw individual response records.
Results are reported in aggregate, and small groups are protected where showing a result could make individuals easier to identify. We deliberately use closed questions in Educity Open rather than asking respondents to type personal comments into the survey.
Why Educity Open is free
We want schools to be able to use Educity before cost becomes the main reason they decide whether it’s useful. That’s why we’re starting with Educity Open.
Educity Open gives your school access to the core self-serve platform, with three survey credits each academic year and the ability to run Pupil Voice, Parent & Carer Voice and Staff Voice without paying a platform fee. That gives you the chance to see whether Educity tells you something valuable about your school.
It also matters to us. The only way to build a genuinely useful product is to see how it works in the real world. We need to learn how schools set campaigns up, how people respond, how leaders use the reports and where the platform needs to improve.
Educity Open is the beginning, not the whole ambition
We’re starting with one clear goal (to help schools understand whole-school experience through pupils, parents, and staff), but education is much broader than one survey.
The platform has been designed to support other controlled measurement frameworks, more specialised surveys and use in different educational settings without having to rebuild the foundations every time. That might one day mean deeper surveys around particular parts of experience. It could mean supporting colleges, universities or other educational organisations.
If you’re interested in the future of Educity, please get in touch.
EDUCITY
EDUCE
a quality of being able to work things out from given facts
to draw or bring out; to infer or
work out from given facts