What the Charter actually commits you to
The Education Staff Wellbeing Charter is voluntary. Nobody made you sign it, and Ofsted doesn't grade you on it. But signing it is a public commitment, and one of the commitments is unusually concrete: to measure staff wellbeing, to respond to what the measurement shows, then to measure again. Signing was the easy part; this commitment is the one that needs a system behind it.
What the DfE doesn't give you is an official question set. There is no Charter survey and no mandated wording or submission route. The method is entirely yours to choose, which is genuine freedom, and also exactly why so many signatory schools stall at this commitment. It's the one that can't be discharged by publishing a policy.
Why “how was your term?” in the staffroom doesn't count
Staffroom conversations, an open door, a wellbeing item on the briefing agenda: all of them real and worth keeping, and none of them measurement. The problem is structural rather than personal, because staff will not name workload drivers to the person who sets the workload. Ask a teacher face to face how they're coping and you'll get the professional answer; ask them in a named survey and you'll get the careful answer. Neither is the true answer.
Two things turn asking into measuring. The first is anonymity: collection that is anonymous by design, with a minimum-group-size guard so that a three-person department can never be picked out of the results. That's what gets you the honest version instead of the polite one. The second is cadence. A single heroic annual survey tells you how one week in June felt, while a short survey each term tells you whether things are getting better or worse, and that second question is the one the Charter is asking.
What to measure
You don't have to invent the themes. The Charter's commitments and Ofsted's own staff questionnaire circle the same ground. Under the November 2025 inspection framework, Ofsted sends every school's staff a short questionnaire during inspection: fourteen statements whose themes include whether leaders show genuine consideration for staff wellbeing, whether workload feels manageable, and whether the school's support around pupils' behaviour and wellbeing actually works. A school's own survey data can be offered as supporting evidence alongside it. So the sensible move is to measure the same territory all year, on your own terms:
- Workload. Not just how heavy it is, but which tasks are driving it.
- Leadership. Whether staff feel leaders take their wellbeing seriously in the decisions that create work.
- Switching off. Whether evenings, weekends and holidays are genuinely theirs.
- Trust. Feeling trusted as a professional, and safe to say when something isn't working.
- Support. Around pupil behaviour and pupil wellbeing, and for staff's own.
Two templates come ready to send. The Charter-aligned staff wellbeing survey covers all five themes in 12 questions, about five minutes of a teacher's time. When workload is the theme you need to open up, the Staff Workload Snapshot goes deeper: 16 questions, around seven minutes, on hours, drivers and the changes that would make the biggest difference.
A cadence that doesn't add workload
The irony of a badly run wellbeing survey is that it becomes workload, both for the leader chasing responses and for the staff filling it in. It doesn't have to. Termly or quarterly is enough to show a trend; each round costs a member of staff about five minutes; and the quarterly staff-pulse year plan schedules the whole year in one go, so nobody has to remember to launch anything in the depths of November.
The step that matters most happens between rounds: publish what you heard and what you're doing about it. One page is plenty: “you said the main workload driver was data entry; we've cut two data drops to one.” That single habit is the difference between a survey staff answer honestly in round three and one they quietly stop opening.
A note to end on. The Charter binds the school, not the software, and measurement is only the method; no survey tool makes staff wellbeing improve by itself. Acting on the results does. A survey nobody acts on is worse than no survey at all, because staff notice, and the silence tells them what their answers were worth. Measure because you intend to respond, and the five minutes a term becomes the best-spent five minutes in the calendar.