How TeacherTapp works
Answer 3 Daily Questions
Each day we ask 3 questions about school life to help build a picture of what's happening in schools.
View Results & Influence Policy
See what everyone else is thinking! We share the results so you learn something new each day.
Ongoing Quick CPD & Monthly Prizes
We give back to those who take part! Recommended daily reads help you be a better teacher PLUS monthly prizes.
FAQs – How to, Funding, Tech Issues
Topics
We are a daily survey app where thousands of teachers answer daily questions so their collective opinions can be heard and used to inform school leaders, media, policy makers and organisations creating products for schools.
Over 9,000 teachers in England take part each day because they love answering questions and seeing the results!
Teacher Tapp welcomes school teachers from all across the world. It was originally designed, and still works best, for mainstream primary, middle or secondary school teachers who work in England, whether state or private.
HOWEVER, any teacher can download the app – and we have many loyal tappers who fall outside the norm. Just be aware, our questions may be less relevant to non-teaching staff, those in early years settings, further education, special schools, or schools outside of England.
First, your responses help provide the daily results on the app – so everyone can learn what’s going on in schools.
Beyond that, Teacher Tapp use the research to influence policy and share the reality of life on the ground in schools.
Our polls regularly feature in national newspapers and on television and radio β making sure teachersβ voices are central to policy debates.
We have also helped dozens of teachers conduct research for their masters, PGCE , NPQs or other qualifications.
Rest assured, we donβt release your personal data to third parties and our systems are designed to encrypt and separate identifying information from answers to questions. You can read more about this in ourΒ privacy policy.
We have some ground rules, but most businesses, organisations, researchers or policymakers will be eligible to submit a question. With our help, you can gain fast insight into the products and services that teachers want and need, boost your advocacy position or scope a new research project. Teacher Tapp gives valuable answers to your questions within a few hours. Find out more about how to submit a question here.
After downloading the app, put it on your homepage and click to allow notifications. Each day, at around 3.30pm, you will be notified there are new questions to answer. Open the app and start tapping. Itβs that simple!
Life gets busy sometimes and it happens where you have missed a day! On these occasions βLifelinesβ can be used to save your streak. You will be prompted to use your lifeline when accessing your app the following day. Please note that should you miss two consecutive days in a row then the lifeline is not available.
Sadly, no. The app only holds 24 hours worth of data. However, if you see a tip in the app that you want to read later, just hit ‘save’ underneath it and come back to it later on the Activity page!
If you miss any, don’t worry! Each Tuesday we do a Teacher Tapp blog that goes out in the daily tip, and that has links to last weekβs tips in it. These blogs are available here.
This is great news! If you love Teacher Tapp please do:
- Tweet your love of Teacher Tapp.
- Or put it on Facebook!
- Share the questions in staffrooms and over lunch.
- Get all of your colleagues to sign up by usingΒ this PDF
- Running an CPD or NQT session? Weβve gotΒ 7 slidesΒ to help you tell your colleagues all about Teacher Tapp
Anyone can sign up to Teacher Tapp but the questions are focused on school issues, so you wonβt be able to answer lots of them honestly if you do not teach in a school for 5-18 year olds. Also, while teachers in FE colleges, early years, overseas, etc, can join the app, their data will be stripped out of the analysis. As Teacher Tapp gets smarter, we want to add in ways for these groups to take part β weβll keep you updated!
All information is held by Teacher Tapp, which is owned by Education Intelligence Limited β a company created by Alex Weatherall, Laura McInerney and Becky Allen. We work hard to ensure the safety and anonymity of your data.
No. Firstly, if we said in advance who commissioned the topic of a question it could introduce bias to the results. But, secondly, and more importantly, we are in control of the questions that come onto the main app and we only ask questions that we feel are fair, which are genuinely seeking to find an answer (not a pre-defined answer), and that meet our editorial beliefs around the usefulness of questions. We do not engage in push polling.
No. Not every teacher is employed at a school β some work as supply teachers and so are employed by agencies. And not every teacher has qualified teacher status β some of our teachers are unqualified trainees on school direct, others are unqualified and not on teacher training routes β making verification through that route tricky too.Instead, on sign-up, teachers manually write in the name and postcode of their school, and then we run a check that these are consistent. We also periodically ask questions to see if answers are clashing with answers and therefore signifying an unlikely teacher. We are able to treat someone as βnot a teacherβ and remove them from the results. Some people also sign up with a non-teacher status (and donβt count in results). We are always open to improving this system. If you have any ideas for how to do without making the sign-up onerous or giving away masses of personal data. If you have suggestions, do let us know via hello@teachertapp.co.uk
Before we launched Teacher Tapp we compiled over 500 questions from a number of sources:
- We had some questions that we had asked teachers in past research studies
- We took lots of standard questions on personal background, attitudes and well-being from the major UK social surveys
- We asked researchers of teacher careers around the world whether we could have the surveys they had used.
But we also want our panel to be asked questions that are topical or even just-for-fun. So each week we make up a few extra questions based on what politicians have been saying and what things teachers are talking about on Twitter. If you have a question you think teachers would enjoy answering then type it into the feedback box on the app. We also allow organisations to commission questions for research or business intelligence, and we freely provide questions and analysis to teachers conducting their own research (e.g. for a dissertation) where their needs to fit with our usersβ interests.
Making social survey datasets publicly available isnβt always straightforward. It isnβt enough to simply remove the personal contact details and school names and publish the whole lot because people would still be uniquely identifiable. For example, it might be possible to see that there is only one black male teacher in the South West region in the study. Now suppose a headteacher in the South West region sees that one of their (black male) teachers is using Teacher Tapp. The headteacher can then look up how that teachers feels about their school and their daily life. The standard βfixβ for this problem (which DfE uses for pupil data, incidentally) is to ensure that no combination of responses is identifying to less than 5 individuals. However, this doesnβt work for on-going longitudinal studies because we never know what questions we might ask in the future that could lead to people being retrospectively identified in past data. For example, now suppose there are 10 black male teachers in the South West region, so we release data that reveals what these teachers think. Later, we decide to find out their ages and learn that only one is under 25 years old. Suddenly, having this new piece of information has revealed a teacher in the public data. We have a wealth of experience in dealing with these data privacy issues and solutions, but as a tiny organisation it is going to be hard for us to work towards facilitating its wider use. Instead we are doing the following: firstly, we are organising hackathon days where people get a chance to play in the data in a secure environment where they canβt walk away with anything and we can control which data is released; secondly, we are working with individual teachers who would like to use the data for a masters dissertation or other research to create bespoke datasets they can use. If this sounds like you then please get in touch.
Knowing your school helps us in two ways. First, it means we donβt need to ask you lots of questions about the type of school you work in. We can look up your schoolβs location, institutional type, governance, performance and inspection rating in administrative data. Second, it helps us to see whether the teachers who are joining Teacher Tapp are representative of teachers across the country. We realise that this information is highly sensitive β your school name is never held in our database alongside any of your responses and we wonβt name schools or pass your personal information back to your employer. You can read more about this here.
Maybe! If they are just causal research questions where the headline data we give you on the app is enough, then complete the online suggestion form by clicking here.Β If you are conducting research for a formal project then readΒ here how we can support you. We try to keep 20% of questions for user suggestions.
Teacher Tapp was originally created using a grant from The Gatsby Foundation and Nesta. It was originally an experiment, which we did in our spare time, and it took a lot of it!
The experiment proved a success and since we hit 2,000 daily users mark, education organisations have increasingly approached us to see if they could ask ask questions or get analysis of past responses.
To make Teacher Tapp sustainable (so we can pay people to manage the app, the questions and the data), since 2018 we’ve charged organisations to ask questions and place adverts.
Afterwards, we provide them with aggregate level results – e.g. the sort of high level data that you see in the weekly findings blog.
We do not sell or give away your personal data, contact details, or data that gives away your identity.
We also make money each month from our Brand Tracker questions. These are a set of questions we ask about education organisations on the first Sunday each month. When we first set up a lot of people wanted to ask questions about their brands but we figured teachers would find it really annoying if we asked them endless marketing questions. Hence, we came up with a way to roll them altogether and only ask once a month! It works for the companies, because they get the data they want, and it works for teachers as they only get asked them once every 30 or so days. Win, win!
Finally, we have now started a service called SchoolSurveys.com which uses our findings from the past five years and helps gives school leaders a way of comparing how their school does against the benchmarks. Again, no personal data is shared. The Teacher Tapp personal data is held separately to School Surveys, so headteachers can’t find out what anyone from their school is saying on Teacher Tapp. The only thing they can do is see the aggregate national scores and compare their own schools.
Altogether these income streams enable us to keep the Teacher Tapp tech and research team going.
We think it’s important that everyone can learn from teachers’ voices and so we try to engage with as many research partners as possible.
However, we are also fiercely protective of the truth and of education. For that reason, we expect all research partners to:
- Genuinely have a question they want the real answer to. We are not interested in trying to find specific answers. We don’t engage in push polling and we are really fussy about not allowing one-sided or biased questions.
- Will endeavour to responsibly and accurately use the data. All of our contracts require research partners to agree that if they use data publicly then we can release the full dataset, so it’s impossible for people to selectively use information and misdirect people without us being able to show the reality.
If you can access the app, go to the ‘contact us’ section in the settings menu and send us a message from there. We will respond via email (usually within 24 hours of working days).
If you cannot access the app, email us via hello@teachertapp.co.uk and we will follow up.
If you are having problems with notifications, please clickΒ hereΒ to check your notification settings are as they need to be.
Sometimes the streak gods are mean and they take away people’s streaks for reasons we don’t understand.
Don’t worry! Send us a message via ‘Contact us’ in the settings menu and we will sort you out once the team are in the office.
You can find the information you need to delete your account here.
Our systems are designed to encrypt and separate identifying information from answers to questions. We will never release school-level data, nor your personal data. For the past decade Becky has worked on some of the most sensitive databases in the country (including the National Pupil Database), so is well-versed in the issues surrounding safe use of large datasets, and Alex (our Chief Technical Officer) worked for 9 years in database development for a telecoms company before he was a teacher, so he knows his stuff too. You can read about this in our Privacy Policy.
There is no straightforward answer to this question. It depends on what we are asking and seeking to find. If we ask 1000 random teachers their opinion on a policy, then as long as all we want is the random opinion of 1000 teachers, we will have an answer that reflects the views of the profession. It wonβt be a very accurate answer if we only ask 1000 primary teachers, or 1000 male teachers, as that isnβt representative of the workforce. So we periodically check behind-the-scenes to see how representative we are compared to the known population of school teachers.We can apply post-stratification weights to analyses to make sure the panel is representative of the teaching population, at least in terms of the characteristics we can easily measure (i.e. school region, type and pupil demographics; teacher age, gender and seniority). This is the sort of thing we do for researchers or organisations looking to get more detailed analysis, similar to what we provide each week in our open-access blogs.
How It Works
Why Our Data Is Representative
How do we make our data representative?
Teacher Tapp asks thousands of teachers three single or multiple-response questions each day. We never ask any other sorts of questions β they are invariably terrible to answer on a mobile phone! In addition to these three questions, it is possible to invite a sample of respondents to answer an additional batch of questions. Weβve never asked more than 12 questions in this additional batch (we wouldnβt want to bore our users).
How do we know our respondents are teachers?
Like other surveys we do rely on trust, but with the advantage that it is impossible to answer our survey twice on the same mobile app. We ask all sign-ups to give us their school name and postcode, alongside details of their job role to conο¬rm they are a teacher. By cross-checking this school information against government databases, we can gain some assurance that they do teach in a school.
How do we know our sample is representative based on observed characteristics?
Teacher Tapp has a representative sample of over 10,000 teachers in England. It is representative, not random. It is important to note that nobody has a random sample of teachers in England (though TALIS came close with 25% non-response by schools and 15% non-response by teachers). Typical DfE, Ofsted or researcher surveys have response rates of under 50% (and often under 10%).
In our analysis, we create a set of post-stratification ‘weights’ that allow us to count the responses of some teachers more than others. We can only adjust for teacher characteristics where we know their proportions in the teacher population and re-weighting cannot be carried out on too many factors at once. Currently, we re-weight by gender, age category, senior leadership status, school phase and private versus state-funded.
To give an example of how these weights work, in a recent analysis we gave female primary classroom teachers in their 30s a weighting of 2.4x the value of a typical respondent. At the other end of the scale, male secondary senior leaders in their 30s were given a weighting of 0.6x the typical respondent.
We work with the data in this way to decide how best to represent the lives of real teachers in England. We are able to show that our weighted sample mirrors the population of teachers by correlating it with other characteristics such as Ofsted rating, school FSM % and school governance.
How do we know our sample is representative based on unmeasured characteristics in the population?
This is more difο¬cult. Our key concern is whether people who enjoy ο¬lling in surveys or using Teacher Tapp are different to those who arenβt.
First, we check we can replicate key ο¬ndings from the TALIS questionnaire, which the closest weβve got to a true random sample in England. This isnβt ideal because many of the TALIS question are quite opaque in their interpretation (the difο¬culty with international questionnairesβ¦).
Second, we check that we do not have unusual groups of teachers distorting our ο¬ndings by re-running our results excluding three particular groups: (i) those who signed up to Teacher Tapp in the ο¬rst two months back in 2017, who principally learnt about it via researchED conferences; (ii) teachers who score very highly on our index of research engagement which we construct from survey questions about how much they engage with academic research; (iii) teachers who say they are extremely active on social media, e.g. writing blog posts.
