School culture survey questions: what to ask staff, and what to do next

If you are looking for school culture survey questions, you have probably already decided that you want an honest picture of how your school feels from the inside. That is a good instinct. But the questions are only half of it. A culture survey is worth running only if people believe their answers will be read, taken seriously and acted on. Get that wrong and the survey itself becomes part of the culture problem.

So before you write a single question, ask yourself something harder. What will we do with what we find?

Decide what you want to learn

Many surveys fail because they try to measure everything. Forty questions about every corner of school life produce a long report and very little action. It is far better to choose a few areas that matter most to you right now.

For most schools, those areas include trust in leadership, how workload is managed, whether staff feel they belong, how well colleagues work together and whether the school's stated values match everyday experience. Pick three or four. You can always look at the others next year.

School culture survey questions that tell you something useful

Good questions describe behaviour people can recognise, rather than asking for a general opinion. "Is morale good?" invites a shrug. "I feel able to raise a concern with my line manager without worrying about the consequences" asks about something real.

Here are some examples you could adapt, each answered on a simple scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree:

Trust. Leaders here do what they say they will do. I am told the reasons behind decisions that affect my work.

Workload. The tasks I am asked to do make a difference to students. Meetings here are a good use of my time.

Belonging. I feel valued as a member of staff. New colleagues are well supported in their first term.

Collaboration. I can ask a colleague for help without feeling judged. We share resources and ideas within my team.

Values in practice. Our school values are visible in how people treat each other, not only in what is written down.

Add one or two open questions at the end, such as "What is one thing that would make this a better place to work?" These often tell you more than the scores.

Keep it short enough to finish in ten minutes, make it anonymous and say clearly who will see the results. If your staff groups are small, report results only at whole-school level so nobody can be identified.

What to do with the answers

This is where trust is won or lost. Share the headline results with all staff within a few weeks, including the uncomfortable ones. People notice very quickly if only the good news is reported.

Then choose a small number of priorities and say what you will do about each. Not ten actions. Two or three that people will actually feel. If staff said meetings waste their time, change how meetings run this term and tell them you have done so because of what they said.

Finally, ask the same core questions again the following year. That is how you see whether anything has really moved, and it shows staff that the survey was not a one-off exercise.

Over more than twenty years in education, I have found that the most useful surveys are rarely the most sophisticated. They are the ones where staff can see a clear line from what they said to what changed.

If you ran a culture survey in your school next month, which question would you be most nervous to read the answers to? That might be the one worth asking first.

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