Oundle School

Project Background

Oundle School is a major HMC independent boarding and day school situated in the town of Oundle in Northamptonshire.

The school ran an anonymous pupil survey to gain feedback about their school lives, ensuring the pupils’ insight was gained to help the school continually provide the highest level of care and support.

The school needed a data entry and capture solution to effectively and anonymously capture 1100 pupil surveys and approached Cleardata to complete this for them. They also wanted the data to be presented in a spreadsheet, with summaries provided for the various questions, so their team could analyse the information quickly and easily.

This enabled Oundle School to save their staff time on manually entering the data from each survey themselves and increase the accuracy of the data recorded.

The Solution

Oundle School sent the completed surveys to Cleardata in sealed envelopes in 7 boxes, with each box containing the documents of a separate academic year, which is how the school wanted to have the data collated.

The 1100 completed pupil surveys were scanned with the company’s Kodak Alaris i5850S high performance scanners outputting 210 pages per minute, effectively speeding up processing times.

It was important to the school that the surveys were anonymous, but also that the output pdf was indexed by the year and House the pupil belonged to. This allowed the school to identify easily which responses were associated with particular groups and therefore target feedback to the pupils effectively.

Once digitised, the data was manually entered into an excel spreadsheet using double blind data entry. This consisted of two operators double checking the information as it was being entered, to ensure the maximum level of quality. A key was also added in the spreadsheet so Oundle School was able to decipher what number equals each answer on the questionnaire.

After the information was correctly captured, the collated data was attached with a link that directed Oundle School to the results of the surveys. This enabled the school to interpret the results easily while maintaining the anonymity of the pupils who had completed the surveys.

The spreadsheet with the results were sent back to Oundle School via SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol). The paper-based documents were then archived for 4 weeks in Cleardata’s secure facility before the school was contacted for permission in having them securely destroyed.

Client Feedback

We found Cleardata via an internet search and found their service to be extremely efficient and effective. From the outset, Graham was very helpful in talking through what we wanted to achieve, and working with us to confirm how best to present our questions and decide on the level of service that we needed to get it off the ground.

We found Cleardata’s service both intelligent and responsive in the way in which they managed the delivery of our project, especially the focus on pupil anonymity.

Their support was invaluable in helping us to understand our pupils’ views in an organised way and respond to them in a timely manner.

Head of Boarding, Oundle School