A new way of doing our Hands up Surveys

BSC have just completed our Hands up Survey for 2021, and although this is not a new thing for us and have been doing them since 2015, we have adopted a whole new way of collecting data! Last year, the Green Team delivered a Professional Learning Workshop to the whole staff at our school alongside the Sustainability committee. The workshop was all about the Your Move program that we run at BSC and the events and activities that we run throughout the year. The aim was to encourage all staff to get on board with our goal for encouraging all of our students to use active transport to and from school. In the workshop, we asked staff specifically about their thoughts for how we should collect data for the Hands up Surveys every year. In past years, since we are a school of about 1600 students and over 100 staff, it has been really difficult to collect whole-school data on the same day for the surveys. The way we have done it for the last couple of years has been through a google form, where registration teachers were all asked to do their surveys on the same day. Last year, the school decided that we were no longer going to have registration classes. This presented a big problem for us and for collecting whole school data on the same day. Majority of staff suggested that the best way to go about it this year was to put each learning area in charge of one year group. However, the problem of collecting data on the same day still exists as all subject areas don't necessarily see all of their classes every day (as classes are only 4 times a week).

As a Sustainability Committee, we discussed in our Term 1 meeting that we would make it the responsibility of the MESH subjects to collect data and it had to be over 2 days to cover the timetable of all classes. Each learning area representative from the Sustainability Site Team was asked to check in with the staff in their departments to make sure they had completed the survey (which in turn makes it a lot easier for me because I don't have to chase up all staff who haven't completed it, which itself sometimes takes a long time). We had Science responsible for Year 7 and 8, Maths responsible for Year 9, HASS responsible for Year 10 and English responsible for Year 11 and 12.

Overall, we had 75% staff compliance with completing the survey on the requested two days last week, which is a huge improvement from last year.

Also interesting is to note the Year 7 cohort data which somewhat may be a product of the Year 7 Transition Project to encourage the new Year 7 students to walk and ride to school and be confident in doing so in their transition from Primary School. See next post :)