This survey is part of independent research that started the way honest questions usually do: years of first-hand accounts from teachers of what reporting season actually costs them, and a question about whether it needs to be this hard. It is not a government survey. It has no connection to the Ministry of Education, any school, or any software vendor, and nothing here is being sold.

The first edition of this research (March 2026) is already published. A second edition is now underway on how the 2026 reporting reform is actually landing, and when it's finished we'll be putting it in front of the Minister of Education on our own initiative, because evidence like this should reach the people making the decisions. This survey is that evidence. Whether you're a teacher writing reports, a school leader reviewing them, a home educator dealing with the Ministry on different terms, or a parent or caregiver reading what comes home, this is your chance to have your experience counted before that edition is finalised.

Takes about 10 minutes, depending on which of those best describes you - based on early real completions rather than an estimate from question count. No names, no student information, anonymous by default. Full detail below.

This isn't a long survey by accident. Every question maps to something specific: either a figure from the published research this project is built on, or a gap that research honestly admits it can't fill without hearing directly from people who do this work, or live with its results.

We ask your role and, where relevant, your school sector and years of experience, because responses are analysed by these groups separately, not just lumped together. That lets us say something is true "for primary teachers" or "for parents of secondary students" rather than just "for people who answered."

This is a shared-link survey, not a random sample drawn from the whole population. That's an honest limitation, not a hidden one: people who see this survey are more likely to already care about school reporting, one way or another. Where we can, we correct for that using a standard statistical technique called post-stratification, which weights responses against a published national denominator. Right now that only works for the primary/secondary split of the teaching workforce - roughly two of the eight school-sector categories this survey asks about. For every other group we reach - other school sectors, home educators, and parents and caregivers - no published national denominator currently exists to weight against, so those results are, and will stay, reported as unweighted descriptive counts until one is sourced.

We publish results in two tiers. While responses build toward 30, this page shows which groups have been heard from and in what proportion -- never a count, a result, or any individual answer. A running, descriptive summary (how many people, from which groups, said what) becomes visible once at least 30 people have responded overall, and stays visible as the count grows -- see "Why results are open" below. Any cell with fewer than 5 responses is never shown on its own, to protect anyone's identifiability. A fuller, weighted analysis, the kind that can properly say "we're confident this reflects the wider population within X percentage points," is held back and released as a dated milestone once we reach 100 and then 200 responses, and again for the second edition itself. Parent and caregiver responses are analysed and reported as their own group throughout, never folded into the teacher figures.

Weighted milestone analyses apply per group, and only where that group has both a published denominator and enough responses to carry the weighting honestly. Respondents who choose "Other" at the first question answer the shorter observational question set.

Before that point, this page shows which groups have been heard from and in what proportion, never counts or results; once 30 people have responded, anyone visiting this page can see a live summary of results so far, updated regularly. We've made that choice deliberately: this research is about transparency in how school reporting works, and it would be a poor argument for transparency if the survey behind it kept its own results secret.

There's a real risk that comes with that choice, and we'd rather name it than hide it: seeing what other people have said can nudge your own answer, even without meaning to. If you're about to look at the current results, please answer honestly from your own experience first, not from what you expect others said. The button to take the survey sits above the results on this page for exactly that reason.