A framework for understanding educational experience
If you want to understand school experience properly, you first need to be clear about what you’re trying to understand.
That’s the role of the Educity Lens.
The Lens is the framework underneath Educity. It’s a structured model of educational experience that defines what our surveys are trying to understand and how the different parts fit together. Rather than beginning with a collection of survey questions and trying to make sense of them afterwards, Educity works the other way around. We start with the experience, then we decide what needs to be measured.
“Do pupils experience an education that helps them become curious, confident and capable?”
the central educity question
Why a framework matters
It’s easy to create a school survey. School experience is too complex to reduce to a few broad questions about happiness or satisfaction.
A pupil might enjoy school but feel that lessons rarely stretch them. They might feel safe but not feel that they belong. They might trust their teachers but not feel confident asking for support.
Those distinctions matter. If your survey only asks broad questions, you can miss them. The Lens gives Educity a way to look at experience in layers. You can start with the broad picture and then move into increasingly specific parts of school life when you want to understand what may be driving it.
The Educity Lens gives the survey a structure. Each part of it exists because we believe that if you want to understand educational experience as a whole, that part of the experience needs to be represented.
Six connected domains
The structure means you can move from a broad result into the detail underneath it instead of being left with a score you can’t explain.
The framework contains six domains covering different parts of educational experience, supported by a more detailed structure underneath them. Together, they cover the different parts of educational experience we believe need to be represented if you’re going to build a rounded picture of school.
Within those broad areas, Educity goes further. The Lens breaks each domain into more narrowly-defined dimensions and then breaks those down further into more specific constructs, each measured by three specific indicators. This enables a report to show you more than a headline score. You can see where different parts of the experience may be pulling in different directions.
Curriculum & Knowledge
Whether pupils encounter a varied, substantial and intellectually ambitious curriculum in which learning builds coherently and connects with wider knowledge, contexts and experience.
Teaching & Learning
Whether pupils experience clear explanation and modelling, appropriate challenge and purposeful practice, and checking, feedback and teaching responses that help them understand and improve.
Inquiry & Thinking
Whether education stimulates pupils’ curiosity, develops disciplined reasoning and enables them to generate, test and improve ideas and solutions.
Agency & Confidence
Whether pupils feel able to contribute and express themselves, make meaningful choices and take increasing responsibility, and act constructively when they encounter difficulty or need support.
Belonging & Support
Whether pupils feel accepted, valued and part of the community, experience positive and respectful relationships and can rely on secure conditions and dependable support.
Application & Readiness
Whether pupils have opportunities to use and combine their learning, develop the capabilities needed to act effectively with others and understand and prepare for their next stage.
What this means when you use Educity
Your survey questions come from this structure. Your results come back through it too.
If a broad area deserves attention, you can keep moving down through the layers in the Lens to understand what respondents were actually telling you, and understand which more specific parts of the experience are contributing to the broader pattern. That means you can target your improvements and celebrations more effectively, and conserve your resources for initiatives that will make the biggest difference.
What the Lens deliberately doesn’t measure
Educity isn’t trying to replace all the other evidence you already have. It doesn’t ask pupils to estimate objective things your school can already measure accurately. It isn’t a compliance audit. It isn’t an attainment measure. It doesn’t treat administrative evidence as though it were the same thing as experience.
The Lens is deliberately focused on experience and perception. That’s the gap Educity is designed to fill.
A score is information, not a verdict
Educity Open converts responses into a common scale and makes it easier to compare different parts of the Lens and understand patterns within a report. The work behind the Lens means you can run a survey knowing that the questions belong to a coherent model and that the report has a structure behind it.
Educity helps you put structure and numbers around experience. What those results mean for your school is still a judgement for you to make.
Are pupils in your school becoming curious, confident and capable?
Educity Open can help you find out.