We are happy to work with all UK secondary schools teaching some or all of Years 7 – 13.

We have worked with all sorts of schools in the past, including:

• Comprehensive schools and non-selective academies, from those delivering academic excellence to those serving highly deprived communities struggling with low aspirations in inner city, rural or coastal settings.
• Grammar schools, including some of the highest-performing in the country.
• Independent schools, from academically elite public schools with internationally-recognised brand names, through to nurturing non-selective independent environments serving families in their area.

The language in the default survey is geared towards schools in England taking GCSEs or A-Levels / BTECs. But we are happy to work with Welsh or Scottish schools too, please contact us to discuss the best way to do this.

We welcome (and encourage!) responses from all year groups from Year 7 through to Year 13.

Not all schools have all years represented, of course – that’s fine.

We have worked in the past with many schools without a sixth form, or sixth-form only colleges, and are always glad to welcome any school to participate regardless of which year groups you teach.

We do encourage you to run the survey with as many of your Y7-13 year groups as possible, however.

It’s very helpful for us to see the evolution of attitudes and behaviours across a student’s secondary school career, and we tailor the questions slightly to make sure they are relevant to all age groups.

However, it is ultimately up to participating schools which year groups participate in the survey. To put it simply, we’ll take what we get 🙂

Our most common stakeholder at a school is the senior academic lead, e.g. Assistant / Deputy Head for Academics / Teaching & Learning / Progress, or Director of Studies.

We do also work with Heads directly, or sometimes with other staff members, especially where they lead on study skills or professional development programmes within your school.

Or if your school is routinely involved in research (e.g. as a Research School or otherwise), your usual research lead would be a natural overseer for the project.

Every year, we face the difficult choice about providing the survey in alternative languages for non-English speakers, and similarly, providing accessible versions for SEND.

We can only offer limited support in these areas without making the project vastly more expensive to run – which would in turn mean having to charge schools to participate, which would be impossible for many schools.

We continue to explore ways to maximise accessibility, but for now, we look to schools for your practical support in making the survey accessible to as many of your students as possible.

For example, the survey questions and answer options can be read out loud to a student, and their answers recorded, either by a peer (e.g. a translator assigned to an ESL student) or by their SEND support or a TA.

This is a GDPR compliant project (of course).

Our privacy policy is circulated to all participating schools, and is also available on request.

But to summarise the most salient point from the policy: we will not collect or store Personal Data because the survey is anonymous.

We undertake robust checks to ensure that individuals are unable to be identified on the basis of the information they provide in the survey.

We also require informed consent from participants before storing and analysing the responses they provide in the survey as part of our research efforts.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth, eh?

The Census is run by Exam Study Expert, a tiny little family-owned UK company with (at time of writing) about 3 employees.

Our mission is to help students study smarter, not harder.

While we do offer paid services (such as revision workshops for schools, or private coaching for students), we also put huge time and effort into our outreach and research initiatives in pursuit of achieving that mission to reach and help as many students as possible.

Think of us like a social enterprise if you will: while we earn our living from this work, we are also incredible driven by our mission to have as big an impact as possible, to improve study skills in whatever ways we can.

The main reason for running the Census is because it’s an incredibly powerful way to achieve this mission.

Schools that work with us on the Census tend to end up placing more emphasis on supporting students with effective study strategy, and do so in more targeted and therefore impactful ways, as a result of the insights from the Census.

On an individual student level, even the simple practice of reflecting on their revision habits for 10 minutes or so in the survey is a potentially very helpful exercise for students to go through.

And zooming out to national level and beyond, we hope that by publishing findings from the Census, we can raise awareness of the opportunity to improve students’ study strategies, and also and empower educators to better understand just how to go about bringing about that change in their school.

To tackle this, think about a student’s participation in the survey – there are two distinct elements:

1. Spending some time answering the questions in the survey about how you study and revise (your answers haven’t been stored or seen by anyone yet)
2. Submitting your answers to the research team, so your data / responses can be analysed as part of our research purposes.

On Part (1), we leave it to school’s discretion to make the activity mandatory or on an opt-in basis.

Most schools we work with choose to make completing the survey a compulsory activity as part of the school day, seeing the exercise of spending 10 minutes reflecting on how you revise as a valuable exercise for students in its own right.

In terms of Part (2) – whether or not your answers are submitted – we ask for informed consent from each participant.

After answering the questions, students are given the option to choose whether to submit their data for research purposes or not. In other words, we seek informed consent from each student participant to store and use the data they provided, but only after they have reflected on and filled in answers to the questions.

This helps guard against the risk that less engaged, lower-achieving students are further disadvantaged by being under-represented in this important research programme because they simply “couldn’t be bothered” to complete the survey, which has been raised as a potentially very serious problem if the entire exercise was on an optional / opt-in basis.