Education Development Trust

Summary

The Education Development Trust is an education charity dedicated to giving young people a future by improving education around the world. By working directly with governments and schools, they make sure that teachers and school leaders are the best they can be to ensure that children everywhere receive a great education.

Talent and Development Manager, Aideen Jones, identified that there was a need to conduct a global survey to research Employee Engagement levels throughout the organisation. With teachers scattered in remote areas all over the world, a robust, flexible solution was needed to deliver the survey so that it could be completed anywhere and the results accessed with complete confidentiality.

The requirement

The Education Development Trust programmes are active in remote locations around the world, including:

• Rwanda – The Building Learning Foundations programme aims to improve the quality of teaching and leadership in Rwanda’s primary schools.
• Kenya – The Girls’ Education Challenge carries out work in the slums of Nairobi and remote villages to ensure that girls can go to school and receive a good quality education
• Brunei – In partnership with the Ministry of Education in Brunei, they lead the world’s most successful English-speaking teacher scheme, recruiting top quality teachers to teach in Brunei’s schools.
• Jordan – Working with the Queen Rania Teacher Academy, they strengthen the capacity of English language teachers working with Syrian refugee children in Jordanian public schools.

The global survey would be distributed by email and, in some remote locations, it would only be picked up sporadically, therefore, it was essential that the survey remained open for a long period of time to allow everybody the opportunity to take part.

Following checks with the Governance Team at the Education Development Trust, it was established that because highly confidential personal data was being collected, they could not use US-based provider SurveyMonkey as their data storage policy was not GDPR compliant.

The solution

Following research to find a UK-based survey provider, the Education Development Trust selected SmartSurvey as the software met the criteria needed for the global Employee Engagement Survey.

SmartSurvey was selected because they provided;

1. A GDPR compliant survey solution
2. ISO 27001 Certification – The highest possible standard for data security
3. A robust platform that could be accessed in remote locations worldwide, on any device

A 20-question survey was carefully designed and built with the following objectives:

• To assist with the formulation of a global learning and development strategy
• Get a temperature check on the organisation worldwide to determine strengths and weaknesses
• Prepare an action plan that could be fed into the Marketing Communications Teams’ activities

Aideen developed a communications plan for the survey that positioned the project as a business improvement initiative. Information was dispersed in advance to build awareness to get buy-in and support throughout the Education Development Trust, with the final request to complete the survey coming from the local business leaders.

The results

Clear KPIs for the research project were set in advance to help the achievement of long-term performance management goals within the Education Development Trust.

Employee Engagement Survey KPIs;

• A greater than 75% completion rate
• Overall employee satisfaction level of 3.6 out of 5.0
• Stretch goal for the campaign of 4.0
• Individual questions satisfaction of 3.6 with a stretch of 4.0

The Education Development Trust’s worldwide employee engagement survey achieved an 81% completion rate, an important indicator of the quality of the survey. Analysis of the results from the global survey identified clear areas of strengths and regions for improvements and resolutely demonstrated that employees of the Education Development Trust are engaged and motivated.

The survey findings and high response rate reinforce the rating of +69 received from the Chartered Institute of Personal Development (CIPD), the professional association for human resource management professionals. This score compares favourably to an average rating of +48 for the Voluntary Sector, positioning the Education Development Trust as an ‘Employer of Choice’ in the charity sector.

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