Learner Voice Wales survey: sixth-forms pilot

Ipsos MORI were commissioned to test how well the existing survey questions, processes and reporting would work in a school sixth-form setting. This report details how the pilot was conducted and concludes with recommendations for a potential future roll-out of the Learner Voice Wales survey among sixth-forms in Wales.

Regarding potential future roll-out the report recommends:

• Enlisting the support of intermediaries at a regional level that have semi-regular contact with the schools, to encourage participation.
• Engagement would increase if it was known that the findings would be used by Estyn and that responses within each school to key questions were published, both of which are true for the main Learner Voice Wales survey.
• A representative sample of learners at each school should participate in the survey to ensure that the findings can be considered to be representative. There are two ways to ensure a representative response: (i) Give an intermediary responsibility for schools within their locality and give them access to the response reports. (ii) Obtain a reliable sample profile of learners within each school before fieldwork commenced. This should include the: total number of sixth-form learners in each school; numbers in each year group; of each gender; and at each qualification level.
• Some thought needs to be given before a potential future roll out about how to obtain a dataset from each of the schools ahead of, or during, fieldwork. The main challenge to the survey was the inability to live-match or retrospectively match the majority of learners that participated in the survey to their course records.