Isle of Wight Council’s Director of Children’s Services Steve Beynon said, “I am aware that there has been a small amount of confusion around the questionnaire analysis and we have sought to rectify that through media briefings.”
“Firstly can I reiterate the stage of the process in which we are currently involved. The informal consultation process and the questionnaire element within that is intended to guide the council in the first part of its decision making around the future structure of the education system on the Island. The formal stage of the statutory process which will then follow this summer and will involve detailed consultation with schools on an area by area basis which will then guide the final decisions around changes to individual schools on the Island.”
“To ensure that the consultation process at this stage was entirely fair and unbiased and in accordance with best practice, the council commissioned QA research, an independent research company to handle the research element of the process. QA will therefore receive, process and analyse the questionnaires before preparing a summary of the findings (not a recommendation) in a report for the council. The council will not be involved in the process or analysis stage and will not have sight of individual questionnaires.”
“In order to ensure that as many people as possible have the opportunity to participate in the consultation, we opted to limit people to one completed questionnaire per person rather than the typically used ‘one per household’ limit. This has been clearly stated in the consultation booklet. However, we were concerned that there may be attempts by some individuals to skew the findings and hence we have also made it clear that multiple applications will be screened by QA and may be discounted. Essentially, the research company will initially screen all of the questionnaires received by post and online. Any that are illegible or defaced or incomplete will then be excluded from further analysis (this has also been made clear in the document). All valid questionnaires will then be entered onto the system. At this stage the research company will be able to identify any questionnaires that have the same postcode and house name/number, gender and age bracket and these will be put to one side. A manual check will then be made by QA on these questionnaires to ensure that they are not multiple submissions.”
“Residents have until this Friday (22 February), when the six week consultation period ends, to make their views on the three options for schools reorganisation known.”
