How do we use the feedback given to us in our pre-inspection questionnaires?

A blog by Jassa Scott, Strategic Director

Before every inspection we gather feedback from learners, staff, parents or carers and other key groups about their experience of a provider.  You can see the questions we ask on our website – Inspection questionnaires – Estyn.

These questionnaires cover a range of matters which help us understand what key people value about a provider and what they think might need to improve.  Before an inspection, inspectors look at the answers given and use these to help think about questions they might ask during an inspection. The feedback in questionnaires is used alongside discussions with learners, staff, governors and parents/carers as part of our evidence base for an inspection. We also look at a range of other evidence.

We changed the questions we used when we updated our inspection arrangements in 2024, so 2024-2025 was the first year we used the new questions. In January, we published the national picture of outcomes from all the learner and parent/carer responses across all our inspections that year, where we had enough inspections to do so.  You can find the national outcomes here Pre-inspection Learner and Parent Questionnaire National Responses – Adroddiad Blynyddol | Annual Report. We use these national responses as a benchmark for individual providers questionnaire responses, though every provider’s context is different.  Providers may find it helpful to consider these national responses if they are conducting similar questionnaires with their learners.

During the last year, we also started collecting demographic information about the learners who were completing our questionnaires. This information is separate from the main questions and isn’t shared with the inspection team for that individual inspection. We will use it to consider any overall patterns in the responses for different groups of learners across Wales to help us better understand their learning experiences. We’ll publish this data alongside our overall national responses in future years once we are happy with the quality of the data.