Strategy
Should your school build its own surveys? Five questions to decide
Free survey tools might save money upfront, but what are they really costing your school in staff time, data quality and student wellbeing?
A principal said something to us recently that struck a chord. She was weighing up whether to build her school's feedback program in-house, and put it like this: "We actually want to spend quality time reflecting on the data and asking what's next, rather than all this time in the middle working out how to organise it."
More school leaders are asking the same question. Every school has a free tool in its stack to build forms, and a capable teacher can build a survey in an afternoon. So why pay? The honest answer is that it depends on the job, and for some jobs you should build it yourself.
When doing it yourself is the right call
If the survey is one-off, low-stakes and nobody can be harmed by being identified by their responses, build it yourself. Carnival feedback, camp logistics, canteen ideas, picking a date for PD. Free tools are quick and perfectly good for these, and a clumsy question doesn't cause problems. Keep your best forms and reuse them.
Things change when the data is about people: what is happening in classrooms, how students are really feeling, or feedback shared for professional growth. This is where free tools quickly reach their limits and you need expert support.
The questions are the hardest part
How you ask a question can shape the answer you get. Writing questions that produce useful insights is a skill, especially when you are asking children. A question can look fine to an adult but mean three different things to a Year 4 student. Bad questions don't announce themselves: the results look just as confident as good data.
Free published tools are rarely specific enough to give an educator the quality feedback they can act on. Copying a commercial provider's questions into your own form is a copyright problem,and developing and validating your own question sets takes time and expertise that most schools don't have to spare.
Honest answers need protection
People answer differently depending on whether they believe their responses can be traced back to them. In a DIY build, whoever owns the form can see every raw response from every participant. Even if they never look, everyone knows that they could, and they may be asked to pass those responses on, so you rarely get the honest feedback you’re looking for.
One school leader asked us twice in the same conversation to confirm that leaders cannot look up an individual student and that teachers cannot see each other's results. That school's whole program rests on staff trusting that the de-identified, pooled data is truly anonymous. When responses are held by a third party and anonymity thresholds are enforced automatically, the fear of being singled out goes away. That trust is what makes teaching feedback a growth tool rather than surveillance, and it is almost impossible to replicate in-house.
Wellbeing data carries a duty of care
A wellbeing survey invites a child to disclose if they need help. Once a student tells you they are not okay, the school must respond. Before you build your own online form, answer this: a student submits something concerning at 3pm on a Friday. Who sees it, when, and what happens next? A form with no triage, no way for a student to ask for help and no notification to a trusted adult is not a saving. It is an unmanaged risk and one that no school should be willing to accept.
The same goes for governance: where student data is stored, who can access it, how long it is kept, and whether the tool would pass the independent security assessment your system expects.
The hidden cost of running surveys on a free form
You want results by class, teacher and year level. With a free tool, you have three options, and each one costs you something:
Students identify their class in the form. Admin stays low, but anonymity is gone and typos corrupt the data.
Many forms or links per class. Anonymity holds, but the admin burden grows with the school. One school copied another's build and ended up with a dropdown of every teacher by every class: about 500 entries for 100 staff.
One anonymous whole-school form. Simple and safe, but you get a single number you can't break down.
A purpose-built platform lets you report at any level without the extra workload, because the class structure is in the system before anyone answers. Every response arrives already tagged, thresholds apply automatically, and reporting by class, teacher and cohort is ready the next day. Setup is real work anywhere. The difference with Pivot is that you do it once, and it supports every teacher or student survey cycle after that.
Collecting the responses is just the beginning
Launching the form is the easy part. The real workload arrives once you start receiving responses: chasing completion, cleaning the data, cutting it by class and cohort, comparing it with last cycle, and writing something leadership can use. It falls on your most senior people and repeats every cycle.
One leader told us that schools that build their own end up "recruiting someone just to analyse the data". Count that time against the licence fee you avoided, and you might find that the saving wasn’t a saving at all. The build also tends to live in one person's head. When they move on, the program stalls, and once the questions drift, this year's results can no longer be compared with last year's, so how do you know if your school is improving?
Five questions to guide your decision
Ask yourself these five questions:
Will this run more than once, with results we compare over time?
Could anyone be harmed, treated unfairly or answer less honestly if they were identified?
Do we need results by class, teacher or cohort?
Could an answer require us to act?
Does the program depend on one person who may not be here in two years?
Mostly no: build it yourself. Otherwise: use a purpose-built instrument.
The bottom line
The real question is not "why pay for something we could build?" It is "once we count everything, does building it save money and valuable time or cost more?"
Building it yourself is never free. The licence fee is easy to see. Senior staff hours, lost depth and duty-of-care risk are not. Count them all, then decide. What you are really paying for is your leaders' time, spent on what's next rather than on how to collect data.
Get in touch with our team to see how we can support your school’s feedback and improvement goals.
Author: Ivan Vysotskiy, CEO of Pivot Professional Learning
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