Leadership and Governance Survey Pack

🔒 New for 2026 and fully aligned to the Ofsted School Inspection Toolkit 2025

Gathering meaningful stakeholder feedback on leadership and governance requires a different kind of question design. You are not asking pupils, parents or staff to pass judgement on your leadership team – you are exploring whether the school has a culture where people feel listened to, valued and confident that decisions are made in their best interests.

Getting this right means moving beyond satisfaction ratings and asking questions that surface genuine experience of culture, communication and trust. This pack gives you everything you need to plan, administer, analyse and act on stakeholder feedback about leadership and governance, and because the core survey templates come pre-populated with carefully considered questions, you can move from planning to distribution with minimal preparation time.

You'll get:

☑️ Three ready-to-use surveys – a pupil survey in two versions (emoji scale for younger or less confident pupils; Likert scale for older or more able pupils), a parent survey and a staff survey – all aligned to the 2025 Ofsted School Inspection Toolkit

☑️ A question and statement bank covering strategic vision and communication, leadership culture and trust, pupil voice and involvement, parent partnership and transparency, staff well-being and workload, and accountability and improvement

☑️ A survey analysis template with tally tables, open question theme tables, a summary and next steps section, and an Overall Summary Triangulation table with RAG ratings

☑️ A pre-survey checklist to guide you through each stage of the process, and four survey letter templates for communicating with parents and staff before and after the survey

☑️ A PDF guidance document covering the full survey cycle, and a free worked example to help you interpret and act on your results

All documents are fully editable so you can adapt them for your school's specific context.

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Leadership and Governance Survey Pack

Leadership and Governance Survey Pack

£10.00 £7.50
£10.00 £7.50
CONTENTS
WHO IT'S FOR
HOW IT CAN HELP
WHAT ELSE?
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What's in this Leadership and Governance Survey Pack?

This pack provides a complete, end-to-end system for gathering, analysing and acting on stakeholder feedback about leadership and governance. Every document is aligned to the 2025 Ofsted School Inspection Toolkit, and the survey templates are pre-populated so your team can get started without having to build surveys from scratch.

You'll get:

☑️ Pupil Feedback Survey (two versions) – the first version uses a four-point emoji/faces scale and is designed for younger pupils or those who may find the Likert format more challenging; it includes eight closed questions and one open question covering whether pupils feel safe to speak up, whether adults listen and act on pupil ideas, whether they have opportunities to take on leadership roles, whether changes are explained clearly, and whether they feel proud to be part of the school. The second version uses a Likert scale (Strongly agree to Strongly disagree) with ten closed questions and two open questions, covering the same themes with more complex language and adding questions about trust in school leaders and whether the school has a culture where pupils feel respected, valued and heard. Both versions avoid a neutral midpoint to encourage pupils to express a preference.

☑️ Parent Feedback Survey – 12 closed questions and 2 open questions using a four-point Likert scale, covering communication and transparency, involvement and partnership, confidence in leadership, and culture and ethos. Questions address whether parents feel informed about decisions and changes, whether their views are listened to and acted upon, whether there are meaningful opportunities to be involved in school life, whether they trust leaders to act in pupils' best interests, and whether the school treats all families fairly. Includes guidance on timing, distribution, anonymity and what to do with a small sample.

☑️ Staff Feedback Survey – 12 closed questions and 2 open questions using a four-point Likert scale, covering strategic vision and direction, leadership culture and professional climate, workload and well-being, and accountability and improvement. Questions address whether the school's vision and priorities are clearly communicated, whether leaders explain the reasoning behind key decisions, whether staff feel their voice is heard, whether there is a culture of openness and trust, whether safeguarding concerns would be taken seriously, and whether leaders manage workload and well-being effectively. An optional role field allows responses to be grouped by teaching and support staff, which can reveal differences in how leadership is experienced across the school. Includes guidance on timing, distribution and target response rates.

☑️ Question and Statement Bank – a broad selection of additional prompts across all three stakeholder groups, organised by theme, for use in surveys, interviews or informal conversations. Pupil themes include: pupil voice and involvement, safety and speaking up, and leadership culture as experienced by pupils. Parent themes include: communication and transparency, involvement and partnership, confidence in leadership, governance awareness, culture and ethos, and trust in leaders. Staff themes include: strategic vision and direction, leadership culture and professional climate, workload, well-being and staff development, and accountability and improvement.

☑️ Survey Analysis Template – tally tables for recording closed responses question by question, open question theme tables for grouping qualitative feedback, a summary and next steps section for capturing key findings and actions, and an Overall Summary Triangulation table with RAG ratings to bring together responses from all three stakeholder groups in one place.

☑️ Pre-Survey Checklist – a step-by-step checklist taking you from clarifying the purpose of your survey through to distributing it, analysing results and updating your school improvement plan, so nothing gets missed at any stage of the process.

☑️ Survey Letter Templates – four editable letter templates: a notification letter and a feedback letter for parents, and a notification letter and a feedback letter for staff, ready to adapt for your school.

☑️ Guidance Document – an 18-page guide covering every stage of the survey cycle, from planning and design through to analysis, reporting and acting on difficult results, with practical advice for leaders at all stages of experience.

☑️ Worked Example – a PDF case study showing how the analysis template works in practice, using a scenario focused on achievement, progress and support for different groups of pupils. It can be read as a standalone guide or used alongside your own data, and is equally useful for new leaders approaching stakeholder surveys for the first time and experienced leaders looking to strengthen their approach.

All documents (except for the PDFs) are fully editable so you can adapt them for your school's specific context.

Who should use this Leadership and Governance Survey Pack?

This pack is designed for headteachers and deputy headteachers who want to gather honest, structured feedback on how leadership is experienced across the school community. It is particularly valuable when beginning a new self-evaluation cycle, when a new headteacher wants to understand the existing culture, or when leaders want to strengthen the evidence base around pupil voice, parental engagement and staff well-being ahead of a review.

Chairs of governors and governance leads will also find this pack useful. The staff survey provides direct evidence of whether the school's strategic vision is well understood, whether leaders are perceived as transparent and consistent, and whether safeguarding concerns would be escalated confidently – all areas governors are expected to scrutinise. The parent survey generates evidence about whether families feel informed, involved and confident in the school's leadership, which is particularly relevant for schools seeking to demonstrate systematic engagement with parent voice.

Trust executives and school improvement leads working across multiple schools will find the consistent structure of the surveys makes it straightforward to gather comparable data on leadership culture across settings, identify patterns and use the triangulation table to support cross-school review and challenge conversations with headteachers.

How can this pack help school leaders gather meaningful feedback on leadership and governance?

This pack helps you tackle the most common challenges leaders face when planning and running stakeholder surveys on leadership and governance.

"How do I find out whether pupils genuinely feel listened to, or whether pupil voice at our school is more of a tick-box exercise?"
Both pupil surveys address this directly. The emoji-scale version asks whether adults listen to what pupils think and say, whether pupil ideas are taken seriously, and whether pupils have had a chance to share their ideas about improving the school. The Likert-scale version goes further, asking whether school leaders make it easy for pupils to share concerns, whether they have had meaningful opportunities to take on leadership roles, and whether the school has a culture where pupils feel respected, valued and heard. The open question asking pupils to recall a time a suggestion led to something changing is particularly revealing – and the absence of examples can itself be informative.

"How can I find out whether parents feel genuinely involved in the school's direction, rather than just informed after decisions have been made?"
The parent survey separates these two things. Closed questions ask whether parents feel their views are listened to and taken seriously, whether the school actively seeks feedback and acts on it, and whether there are meaningful opportunities for involvement – not just whether communication is clear. The open question asking what leaders could do differently to make parents feel more informed, involved or listened to frequently generates the most specific and actionable responses.

"How do I gather honest staff views on leadership culture without the survey feeling like a management exercise?"
The staff survey is designed specifically with this tension in mind. Collecting surveys centrally rather than through line managers, the anonymity guidance and the optional rather than mandatory role field all support candid responses. The questions themselves cover whether there is a genuine culture of openness and trust, whether staff feel their voice influences decisions and whether leaders model the values they expect from others – all of which go beyond surface-level satisfaction. The optional role field means you can also explore whether support staff and classroom teachers have meaningfully different experiences of leadership.

"How can I demonstrate that safeguarding culture is strong and that staff would feel confident raising concerns?"
The staff survey includes a direct question on whether concerns raised about safeguarding or pupil well-being would be taken seriously, which provides useful corroborating evidence alongside your other safeguarding records and processes. The Question and Statement Bank also includes additional safeguarding-related prompts for use in focused conversations or follow-up discussions where you want to go deeper on this theme.

"How do I use survey data to have a more productive conversation with governors about the health of the school's leadership culture?"
The triangulation table in the analysis template brings together findings from pupils, parents and staff in a single RAG-rated summary, which provides a clear starting point for a governing body discussion. Where responses across stakeholder groups are consistent, that gives leaders confidence in their judgements. Where they diverge – for example, if parents feel well informed while staff feel less consulted – that divergence is itself evidence worth exploring.

Want to build on your leadership and governance work?

Browse the full range of Honeyguide leadership and governance resources to find tools that support every stage of your self-evaluation and school improvement work in this area.

Take leadership further...

Leadership and Governance Audit Pack

The Leadership and Governance Audit Pack goes further than surveying stakeholder views, evaluating the systems, structures and practices that underpin effective leadership and governance at school. Where surveys tell you how leadership is experienced by pupils, parents and staff, the audit examines the underlying frameworks, from how strategic priorities are set and communicated to how governors fulfil their accountability function and how leaders evaluate the impact of their decisions. Strong survey data is a valuable component of a robust leadership and governance audit, and together they provide the rounded, evidence-informed self-evaluation that supports confident leadership and effective governance.

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