We can't stress enough what an important part of the service you provide is effective communication with the families of children in your service. Soliciting specific feedback on the experience of parents and the children in your service achieves two things: First, it conveys to them your interest in providing the best possible service. Second, it gets you the information you need to assess what you could be doing better from their point of view.
The End of Year Parent Satisfaction Survey is now live on the Early Years Shop! It is important to form strong partnerships with parents/families to encourage and maintain compatible communication and connection. Receiving regular feedback from families allows services to collate information in order to review existing practices, facilities and procedures.
Feedback received from parents can be analysed with a view to making any improvements. Furthermore, it can result in implementing a new practice that is not already in place. This will benefit not just the families of existing children but also the future children and families. To help and guide services with collating feedback from families, Canavan Byrne have devised a new Parent Survey. This survey is designed to help services gather information in a simple and accessible way.
The survey includes starter questions formulated by Canavan Byrne but they can be edited to suit your own service needs. Remember any survey should follow a structured approach so that services get the most accurate and relevant feedback. Services can distribute the survey at any point of the year (online), as regularly as required and tailor it to suit the specific areas they wish to gauge or review. The data received can be exported to excel so that services can access it easily to read and study the information received.
Questions should include items such as introduction (how parents were welcomed), information (availability of policy information etc.), facilities (care rooms, play rooms etc.), staff (warmth, friendliness, responsiveness), handovers (consistency, communication etc.), detail (transition aids, comfort tips etc.), curricula (daily activity communication) and themes/activities (variation of themes, activities, events). The survey can be used to suit your individual service needs whether you are a sessional, full day or after school service.
Benefits of the Parent Satisfaction Survey
- Collect and understand parent opinions and perceptions towards an Early Years Service
- Analyse the data and share with staff members to maintain a high quality standard
- Use the data to improve the quality of service
- Shows parents that the service values their opinion
- Builds and maintains strong relationships with families
- Shows that your service is pro-active and inclusive in maintaining quality of service.
Great news for Early Years Resource Factory members - the End of Year Parent Satisfaction Survey is FREE! You will be prompted at checkout for your EYRF login and password, and you will receive access to the Survey free of charge! We will also be providing round-the-year access to create unlimited surveys for EYRF members through the Early Years Resource Factory website! There are a number of benefits to becoming an EYRF member, such as gaining access to a library of Aistear/Montessori Curriculum Plans, Monthly Newsletter, a library of notices and signs, access to all Friday Freebies and many discounts on products across the Early Years Shop!
