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Bristol Primary Headteachers’ Conference 2005

Encouraging debate and honest answers with TurningPoint

Overview

Bristol LEA wanted to carry out a live trial of the annual Audit Commission’s School Survey at the Bristol Primary Headteachers’ Conference 2005. They needed a tool that would enable all the schools to give anonymous answers to their questions so that they could be truthful in their responses. It was also important for each individual school to see the feedback from other schools, enabling them to benchmark their answers against the overall result and encourage group debate. Neil Tuttiett, Primary ICT Adviser for Bristol LEA , decided that TurningPoint would be the best tool to meet their requirements.

Preparation

Thanks to its simple technology, relatively little preparation was required before the conference. The majority of the presentation materials were already in Microsoft PowerPoint so they could be used in exactly the same format. This meant no technical learning curve for the presenters, as TurningPoint works in exactly the same way as Microsoft Office.

The organisers also wanted to make sure that the tool would be effective for a conference of this size. Although it is typically used in a classroom with only 30 pupils, TurningPoint is highly scalable and can deal with up to 1,280 people responding to questions at any one time, so a conference of this type was well within its capabilities.

The Event

Before the first session Neil Tuttiett introduced the idea of using TurningPoint for the Audit Commission Survey and members of the audience were excited about gaining hands-on experience of the technology. As it is so simple to use, the audience needed only five minutes training before they could get started. As a result, the system performed admirably and the entire room was comfortable with it within just two practice questions.

Heather Tomlinson, Director of Education & Children's Services at Bristol LEA, ran the main polling session. The delegates were voting anonymously and so could respond with honest answers without being embarrassed or influenced by their peers. After each question the results were displayed instantly in a graph for all to see. Members of the LEA seemed surprised by the overall upbeat nature of many responses since they were expecting some levels of cynicism. It seemed that when schools were asked to answer the questions honestly without consulting each other, it was difficult for any pessimism to creep in and affect the results. Using TurningPoint in this way helped to illustrate how anonymous feedback can lead to less biased and more accurate results. With such a high level of positive feedback from the trial survey, the LEA was strongly encouraged that the headteachers would voice the same opinions for the Audit Commission’s actual survey.

Following the event

While the delegates were taking a coffee break immediately after the survey, they were presented with the following data:

• A graphical summary of the overall results in Microsoft Excel format.
• A graphical summary of the demographic results in Microsoft Excel format.
• A list of the questions asked in Microsoft Word format.
• A snapshot of the presentation at the end of the day, with all the live graphs captured, in Microsoft PowerPoint format.

After the event, the Bristol LEA found the reports generated by TurningPoint vital for their post conference analysis. They plan to use their survey results to help form and direct improvements to their services.

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