What changed in November 2025
The renewed framework replaced the single overall judgement with report cards that grade named areas, and one of them covers pupils' personal development and well-being. That moved wellbeing from the background of an inspection to a line every parent reads. At the same time, Ofsted refreshed the questionnaires it sends during inspection: every pupil gets a short survey about enjoying school, feeling safe, behaviour, fairness and support, and every member of staff gets fourteen statements covering leadership, workload, behaviour and how well the school supports pupils' well-being.
Both question sets are published on gov.uk under the Open Government Licence, updated 27 November 2025. They are not a secret, and that is the point of this guide: the questions your school will be judged against are sitting in public, waiting to be asked.
Ofsted will survey your pupils whether you do or not
During an inspection window, the pupil and staff questionnaires go out and the results land with the inspection team, not with you first. For a school that has never asked these questions internally, that is the worst possible moment to discover that Year 10 doesn't feel safe at social times, or that support staff don't believe leaders take workload into account. Nothing about the finding is new; only the timing is, and the timing is the part you could have controlled.
There is no way to opt out of Ofsted's own surveys, and no third-party tool substitutes for them. What a school can do is make sure the answers are never news: ask the same questions, anonymously, a few times a year, and act on what comes back while there is still time for the acting to show.
Run the same questions, on your terms
Two templates come ready to send, mirroring the published question text. The Ofsted-style pupil survey carries the pupil questions — about five minutes, anonymous by design, with a free-text prompt for anyone who doesn’t always feel safe. The Ofsted-style staff survey carries the fourteen staff statements, from “well led and managed” to professional development.
- No surprises. The first time leaders see these answers should not be mid-inspection.
- Trends, not snapshots.Ofsted’s questionnaire captures one week; termly rounds show whether safety and belonging are moving in the right direction.
- Time to act.“I don’t feel safe at lunchtime” heard in October is a duty rota change; heard during inspection week, it is a finding.
What counts as evidence
Your own survey data does not replace Ofsted's, but it can be offered as supporting evidence, and inspectors are used to receiving it. What makes it persuasive is not polish but provenance: dated, anonymous rounds with respectable response rates, and a visible action after each one. A school that can show three terms of pupil voice, the dip it caught, and the change that followed is demonstrating exactly what the personal development grade is trying to measure.
The honest caveat, as always: no survey tool is graded, the school is, and a survey nobody acts on is worse than no survey at all. Anonymity matters too. Pupils and staff give the true answer only when they trust it cannot be traced back to them, which is why these templates run anonymous by default, with a minimum-group-size guard so a small department or friendship group can never be picked out of the results.