Working with young people in Year 7 to improve the #BeeWell survey

In 2024, our #BeeWell team in Greater Manchester delivered the survey for the first time to young people in Year 7. It’s been really exciting to hear from this new cohort of young people and explore differences in wellbeing. We invited this year group to take part following feedback from our #BeeWell schools. #BeeWell Leads told us they wanted to hear from young people in Year 7 to strengthen the insights they had about their pupils as they are newly attending the school.

Following our delivery of the survey to Year 7s, we then delivered feedback workshops with young people in the Summer term. These workshops have helped us understand barriers young people in a younger age group have faced to take part in the survey, and we’re pleased to share the actions we have taken because of working with these young people.

What did we do?

We delivered four workshops with secondary schools across Greater Manchester, hearing from over 50 young people to get their feedback on the survey. We facilitated a workshop that aimed to explore:

What wellbeing meant to Year 7 pupils,

What they do in an average week that affects their wellbeing,

How we should communicate with them about the survey,

Specific feedback on the survey questions.

Based on teacher feedback, we wanted to understand the amendments and improvements we could make to the survey questions relevant to young people’s understanding and experiences, whilst also ensuring we keep survey questions consistent where possible to ensure the data from the survey is comparable year on year.

What did we hear, and what have we done about it?

Survey visuals and branding

We have heard positive feedback from young people about our #BeeWell brand, but young people and teachers told us that the same visuals didn’t carry into the survey. Young people didn’t associate taking part in the survey with the other things they had seen about #BeeWell. As a result, we’ve improved the visual identity of the survey over the Summer break, seeking to make sure young people understand that the survey they are taking part in connects to the wider programme and action being taken to improve wellbeing.

Introducing the survey

Young people told us that they want clear instructions about what they are taking part in, what to expect and why we are asking them these questions. We have updated our school support resources to reflect this feedback and will be creating new videos to introduce the survey over the next academic year. We recommend our schools should use these resources or their own, as young people told us we should use assemblies, posters and videos to introduce the survey and ensure the instructions are clear.

Removing some survey questions

On average, we know that most young people in Year 7 take 26 minutes to take part in the survey, which is slightly longer than for Year 10s (22 minutes on average). In this feedback exercise, we agreed that where young people told us questions were particularly difficult, we would look into removing those from the Year 7 version of the survey. As a result, we have removed questions on stress and coping.

Small amendments to survey questions

Young people also made suggestions on how we could improve some of our questions, to make them easier for those taking part in the survey to understand. This includes:

For some questions about wellbeing, we are including ‘hover over’ definitions within the survey, to help young people with tricky words or phrases. We’re also doing this for questions about hope and optimism for the future and school belonging.

Young people suggested we should make changes to the way we ask questions on gender and sexual orientation, simplifying the question and response options, whilst also providing definitions as ‘hover overs’ where it would be helpful to do so.

We have improved our question on if young people feel heard/listened to, based on feedback received. To do so, we have added examples of where they may go outside of home/school where there are adults that might listen to them.

Young people suggested we should ensure it is clear why we are asking some questions, so young people understand it and are more likely to answer, for example our questions about migration. As a result, we have amended some of our resources and introduction to survey questions.

Positive feedback

We also received positive feedback about some of the new questions we had asked for the first time, for example questions about food security, volunteering, school discipline and nutrition.

Thank you to the schools that hosted us for these sessions and the young people that shared their views with us. We hope these small amendments help more young people to take part this year, but always want to hear feedback from our #BeeWell schools if you have further suggestions. The Greater Manchester team can be reached at beewell@manchester.ac.uk.