Parental Involvement and Engagement Census Scotland 2021/22

Questionnaire Design

In development of the PIE Census 2018/19 the PIE Census Content Group agreed a core questionnaire for data collection in Spring/Summer 2019. The Content Group members included representatives from local authorities, Connect, National Parent Forum of Scotland, and Association of Directors of Education in Scotland. The PIE Census 2018/19 was the first data collection using this model, and following the census local authorities were encouraged to provide feedback on what worked well, and where improvement could be made.

Following the 2018/19 PIE Census, an Implementation Group reviewed the feedback from the 2018/19 Census and agreed changes to the questionnaire. The agreed changes were made to the core questionnaire:

• inclusion of a new question on children’s rights;
• inclusion of a new question on cost of the school day;
• introduction of branching question to route to the correct the school list so all parents/carers of children in primary, secondary or special schools/units use a single url for the questionnaire.
• amendments to the four questions on parental preferences on frequency of contact, based on feedback on the use of the data collected in 2018/19.
• a review of consistency across the questionnaire - this related to supplementary or introductory text.
• amendments to the two questions on the school asking for parental views and taking them into account, based on feedback on the use of the data collected in 2018/19.

In the development of the core PIE questionnaire, the Implementation Group were clear that maintaining a time series with the 2018/19 questions was important to enable monitoring progress in improvement planning and actions.

The core questionnaire can be found in Section 4.

Local authorities have the flexibility to add or remove questions from the questionnaire, to best inform their improvement activity. Scottish Government ask local authorities to share only the data for the questions agreed in the core questionnaire.