A staff wellbeing survey asks the people who work in your school how they are doing: their workload, their wellbeing, the support they get from leaders and line managers, and their chances to develop. Done well, it tells leaders what to fix first. Done badly, it tells them only what staff felt safe to say.
This guide covers what to ask, how to keep it anonymous, when to run it, and how to read the results. For every step of running one, from telling staff to sending reminders, see how to run a staff survey.
What to ask
Keep it short enough to finish in a few minutes, and ask about things leaders can act on. Most staff wellbeing surveys cover four areas:
- Wellbeing: stress, job satisfaction, and whether the job leaves enough time for a personal life.
- Workload: whether it is manageable, and how much control staff have over it.
- Leadership and line management: whether staff feel valued, supported and listened to.
- Development: training, feedback and routes to progress.
Ask the questions in the same words each time, so this year's results can be set beside last year's.
Our Staff wellbeing and workload survey covers these four areas in 19 questions, in about 6 minutes. The Teacher and leader survey with national comparison asks 19 questions from the Department for Education's Working lives of teachers and leaders survey, word for word, so each answer sits beside England's figure.
How England compares
The Department for Education's Working lives of teachers and leaders survey asked teachers and leaders in England these questions in its fourth wave, from January to May 2025:
- 67.9% feel valued by their school.
- 54.7% say their school's leadership team supports their wellbeing.
- 53.8% are satisfied with their job most or all of the time.
- On stress, 43.2% strongly agree and 43.3% tend to agree that they experience stress in their work.
Source: DfE Working lives of teachers and leaders, wave 4 (January to May 2025), teachers and leaders in England. Each page shows every answer, the figure for your phase, and how many answered.
A national figure turns "62% of our staff feel valued" from a number into an answer: it is below England's 67.9%, but whether the gap is real depends on how many of your staff answered. That is what the comparison in our report tests.
Keeping it anonymous
Staff answer honestly only if they are sure no one can work out what they said. That matters more in a school than in most workplaces, because teams are small.
- Do not ask for names, or for details that together identify someone, such as role, subject and length of service in a small department.
- Show results for a group only when enough people in it answered. Ours shows a group only when 10 or more staff answered, and hides another group too if the hidden one could be worked out by subtraction.
- Read written comments for names before anyone else sees them.
- Tell staff, before they start, who will see the results and what will happen next.
Our anonymity page shows these rules working on a fictional school.
When to run it
Choose a point in the year away from reports, exams and other peaks, and run it at the same point each year so results compare. Leave it open for about two weeks, and give staff time in a meeting or briefing to answer.
If your school has signed the Department for Education's Education staff wellbeing charter (2021), a set of commitments to the wellbeing and mental health of staff that state schools and colleges in England can sign up to, a regular survey is one way to show how you are doing against it.
What to do with the results
Share a summary with staff within a few weeks, including what was hard to hear. Choose two or three priorities, say what will change, and survey again at the same point next year to see whether it did. Our report compares each run with the last one for the same survey.
What it costs with Benchmark.Pulse
Running a survey is free, and so is the headline result when it closes. The full report, with every chart, comments grouped into themes and briefing slides, is £149. See pricing, or read a sample report first.