Please make sure that you do not click on the 'Mark as complete' button on the Hub until you have fully finished this section.
About the Pupil Questionnaire
It's incredibly important to monitor levels of bullying and wellbeing across the whole school by understanding the experiences of your pupils and for this to inform your anti-bullying work. As well as providing an overall picture of levels of bullying and wellbeing in your school/setting, it also helps to identify where you might need to focus your anti-bullying energy.
As part of the UAB+ programme, you must survey Year 9 pupils twice during Year 2 (in the Autumn and Summer terms). This is to continue to measure the impact of the changes you implement.
The ABA Pupil Questionnaire is an evidence-based accessible questionnaire developed through research and consultation with the Anna Freud Centre to create a set of indicators that best capture the incidence and experience of bullying and assess wellbeing. The confidential questionnaire was originally tested with pupils with a range of SEN aged 8 upwards and has since been used by thousands of pupils across the country. Every child is different and schools are best placed to understand the complexity of their needs and support them accordingly. However, it is vital that you do not see the pupils' answers or influence their answers in any way. You can see the full question list attached.
The pupil questionnaire comprises of three focus points:
- Some questions are about school
- Some questions are about pupil relationships
- Some questions are about wellbeing
It will help you to ascertain:
- the wellbeing of pupils and the levels of bullying in your school
- differing experiences of bullying based on pupil demographics, including groups of pupils most at risk such as those with SEND and those on Free School Meals
- what specific areas you need to focus on as part of your anti-bullying activity
Uploading pupils
1. Prepare pupil data. Export Year 9 pupil data from your school's MIS (management information system) to an Excel spreadsheet. Don't include pupils whose parents/carers have opted out. You can include other columns of data in the exported spreadsheet but the mandatory columns needed are:
- Pupil UPN
- pupil first name
- pupil last name
- year group
- class
- gender
- free school meal status
- SEN/D status
- Ethnicity
- Faith
- Looked after Child (LAC) status
- English as an Additional Language (EAL) status
- Young Carer status
The system will accept most variations of the demographic data (see list here). If you do not record any of these characteristics, simply input 'N/A' for each pupil into the relevant column.
The system will exclude the information it doesn't need. Some schools prefer to use false names or codes for pupils. This is fine but should be managed very carefully to ensure you give the right access code to the right child at each collection. Otherwise, there is a risk that you will not get correct data relating to demographics and the school year.
Please be aware that only the Gender, SEND and FSM data will show in the dashboard reports due to the complexity of the data variations, but all data is included in the analysis and evaluation of the programme, and will help us to understand levels of bullying and wellbeing for these groups.
3. Load the information to the platform. In the questionnaire section of the platform, click on 'Import pupils' as shown below
Once you have uploaded the Excel file with your data, you'll see that it immediately appears on the screen.
If you try to import data for 1000+ students at once, you will get the alert “you can import only 1000 pupils at a time”. If you come across this problem, please do import the data in groups of under 1000 pupils at a time.
4. Validate the data. Make sure the information you have uploaded matches what the system needs in order to generate your reports. Different schools' MIS systems will have slightly different headers for each column, so you need to follow the instructions on the screen to tell the system which column contains what information to match the data.
Follow the instructions on the screen to match the data and then press 'Submit' once complete. You will see that the screen shows only some of the pupil data that you've uploaded. Be assured that the rest is safely encrypted on the server. It does not need to be shown on the screen and it is better from a privacy perspective if it isn't, so we only show what's needed to allow you to manage the data.
As long as you have not marked the section as complete, you can add more pupils at a later date. To do this, please import an excel document with the new information – following the same process you used previously.
Completing the baseline questionnaire
1. Download pupil access keys. Each pupil is given a unique code to complete the questionnaire. This is so the system can identify the answers according to each demographic and year group. Press the 'Download access keys' button to generate a PDF that you can print off and distribute to class teachers and pupils. You have an option to print the keys all together for the whole school, or just by year or class group. We have also made the information available in an Excel sheet in case you need to email the keys to the pupils.
2. Distribute access keys. The PDF contains instructions for the member of staff who is supporting pupils to undertake the questionnaire. It also has a list of all pupil names and access keys. Then it has individual instruction letters for each pupil. Please note the access keys are confidential and pupil specific. Hence care should be taken at the time of distributing the keys, especially if printing. All these should be gathered and disposed of after use to ensure that no pupils or other person fill in a questionnaire in someone else's name.
3. Pupils complete the questionnaire. Pupils start the questionnaire at https://www.uabplus.anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/pupil. Within the system, they are given support to understand the process and to give informed consent.* Once at least 20 pupils have completed the process (this is to ensure that schools cannot identify individual pupils’ answers), schools can start generating anonymous reports based on this data via 'My Dashboard' on the platform. If for any reason a parent/carer or pupil withdraws their consent to take part, the school is expected to delete the pupil(s) accordingly. Upon deletion, all answers submitted by the pupil(s) will be erased from the system.
4. Mark as complete. It is very important that you only do this once you are satisfied that as many pupils as possible have completed the questionnaire.
*You should also signpost to additional sources of support for pupils who have participated - we have lots of resources on our website that you could share: anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/tools-information/advice-and-support/if-youre-being-bullied.
Completing the final questionnaire
When you come to complete the final questionnaire in the Summer term, your data will still be in place from last time. You also have an option to import additional pupils if you wish. Just repeat the steps above and these will be added to the pupils who you imported last time.
Pupils taking the questionnaire use the same link https://www.uabplus.anti-bullyingalliance.org.uk/pupil and follow exactly the same steps as at baseline. The system will automatically sort their answers into the new report.
The ABA Pupil Questionnaire and Data Protection/GDPR
The Pupil Questionnaire platform has been designed with security at its core. All information collected will be kept confidential and will be encrypted and carefully stored on a secure system held in accordance with the UK GDPR (Data Protection Act 2018 - “DPA” and EU Directive 2016/680 and Regulation EU/2016/679 – The General Data Protection Regulation “EU GDPR”).
For further information, please see the Parent Information Sheet and Data Privacy Notice.
For further advice, contact your Data Protection Officer and refer to the ICO guidance.
Please also see our Privacy Statement or email: [email protected] for any queries.