Turn large numbers of responses into a single clear picture
Educity Voice turns responses from pupils, parents and carers, and staff into a structured view of school experience.
The calculation is deliberately structured and transparent. The method is designed to do three things well: make individual answers comparable, combine them consistently, and avoid showing results when there is not enough evidence to do so responsibly. Every scored result can be traced back to the questions that contributed to it, while rules for privacy, minimum response levels and missing evidence determine when a result should, and should not, be shown. This page explains how that works.
From individual answers to the Educity Lens
The Educity Lens contains 54 constructs: the specific things we are trying to understand about the experience of education. These constructs sit within 18 dimensions and six broader domains. Educity Voice asks two Lens questions about each construct: a primary question asked to everyone; and one of two alternative supporting questions, allocated through the controlled survey forms.
This means every respondent contributes two pieces of evidence to each construct without everyone having to answer every possible question in the question bank. The two responses are combined to produce that respondent’s score for the construct. Those individual scores can then be combined across respondents to build the school’s results.
Curriculum & Knowledge
Teaching & Learning
Inquiry & Thinking
Agency & Confidence
Belonging & Support
Application & Readiness
Why we publish the methodology
Schools should be able to understand how their results have been created. That is why Educity does not rely on a hidden score or an unexplained algorithm.
The purpose of the calculation is to organise evidence consistently, protect respondents and make complex patterns easier to examine, while leaving interpretation and judgement where they belong: with the people using the evidence.
How individual answers are scored
Most Lens questions use a five-point agreement scale. Scored responses are converted onto a 0–100 scale:
Strongly disagree = 0
Disagree = 25
Neither agree nor disagree = 50
Agree = 75
Strongly agree = 100
Some questions are deliberately phrased in the opposite direction. For those questions the scoring is reversed so that, throughout Educity, a higher score consistently represents a more positive result in relation to the construct being measured.
If both questions for a construct have valid scored answers, the respondent’s construct score is their average. If only one has a valid score, that score is used. If neither has a valid score, that respondent does not contribute a score to that construct.
A missing or non-scoring answer is never treated as zero.
How scores are combined
Educity uses equal conceptual weighting. For each audience:
- valid respondent scores are averaged to create each construct score;
- construct scores are averaged into dimensions;
- dimensions are built from their constituent constructs;
- domain scores are built from the constructs within them; and
- the overall Educity Lens score reflects the six-domain structure.
A construct with more respondents does not automatically receive more influence over the overall result than another publishable construct. This is intentional. The calculation is designed to reflect the structure of the Educity Lens rather than allowing areas with more answered questions to dominate the result.
Red, Amber and Green
Publishable Lens scores are given a simple Red, Amber or Green classification:
- Red: below 50
- Amber: 50 to below 75
- Green: 75 or above
The classification is applied to the underlying unrounded score.
This means rounding the displayed number cannot move a result across a threshold.
RAG is intended to make patterns easier to read. It does not turn a complex aspect of school experience into a pass/fail judgement.
Recommendation score
The final required question asks respondents how likely they would be to recommend the school.
This is analysed using the conventional Net Promoter Score approach:
- 9–10: Promoters
- 7–8: Passives
- 0–6: Detractors
The percentage of detractors is subtracted from the percentage of promoters to give a score between −100 and +100.
This result is supplementary evidence. It is not part of the Educity Lens score and does not use the Lens Red, Amber and Green thresholds.
Holistic questions
Educity Voice also includes three broader holistic questions.
These provide a useful high-level view of respondents’ experience, but they are deliberately kept separate from the Educity Lens score.
They do not increase or reduce a school’s construct, dimension, domain or overall Lens result.
This gives schools an additional point of comparison without allowing broad overall impressions to override the more structured evidence within the Lens.
Critical-candidate questions
A small number of Lens questions are identified as critical candidates because the subject they cover may warrant particular attention when results are reviewed.
They are not given additional weight.
They contribute to the Lens calculation in exactly the same way as other framework questions.
Educity may also show aggregate information such as their score, valid response count and adverse response rate.
For this purpose, an adverse response is one whose direction-adjusted score is below 50.
This treatment is designed to make potentially important patterns easier to notice. It does not generate individual alerts, identify respondents, confirm that an incident has occurred or create a separate “critical score”.
When a result is not shown
Educity does not publish every number that can technically be calculated. Three checks are applied.
Privacy protection
A population with fewer than five responses is suppressed. This privacy threshold is separate from the statistical rules below.
Minimum valid responses
A construct needs at least 10 valid scored respondent observations. Non-scoring responses do not count towards that total. A group with five to nine completed surveys therefore is not automatically privacy-suppressed, but will have insufficient responses for its scores to be shown.
Coverage
A domain contains nine constructs. At least eight of the nine must be publishable for the domain score to be shown.
Where there is not enough evidence, Educity reports the reason rather than displaying a misleading zero or leaving an unexplained blank.
Pupils, parents and carers, and staff are kept separate
Educity Voice is completed separately by pupils, parents and carers, and staff. Their results are not blended into a single stakeholder score. That matters because each group experiences school differently. A high staff result should not conceal a weaker pupil result, and a strong parent result should not compensate mathematically for a different pupil experience.
Where comparison is useful, Educity shows the difference between the adult audience and the pupil result. For example:
Parent and Carer gap = Parent and Carer score − Pupil score
Staff gap = Staff score − Pupil score
A positive gap means the adult audience has scored the area more positively than pupils. A negative gap means pupils have scored it more positively. These gaps describe alignment or difference. They are not, by themselves, a judgement about which audience is “right”.
What the scores mean, and what they don’t
Educity is intended to help schools see patterns in experience that may otherwise be difficult to identify. A score is evidence, not a diagnosis. Differences between audiences, lower-scoring areas and changes over time can all provide useful starting points for enquiry. They still need to be understood in context.
Educity is designed to make evidence easier to see, not to replace professional judgement. A lower score can point towards an area worth understanding better. A disagreement between pupils and adults can reveal an important difference in experience. A strong result can help identify something worth protecting or learning from. None of those conclusions should be drawn from a number in isolation.
Educity does not automatically prescribe what a school should do in response to a result. The Lens, Voice instrument and calculation method are controlled and versioned so that results can be reproduced and changes to the methodology can be tracked.
As Educity moves through piloting and further validation work, the measurement system will continue to be tested. We will distinguish clearly between the calculation rules that are fixed for a particular release and any broader claims that require evidence from real-world use.