When a family leaves your school, you want to know why. For families that leave before completing the final grade your school serves, you need to know what wasn’t meeting their expectations, what may have increased their value perception, and what is attracting them to other schools. For families that are moving on after completing your program, you want to know what worked for each student and what could have been improved. This information will help you identify your school’s strengths as well as highlight areas to improve or grow. Useful feedback, however, depends on how you collect the information.
Exit Interviews
Exit interviews are most often conducted face-to-face by the School Head. These can be used to gain feedback from students during their last year prior to graduation, or with families that are choosing to leave your school. Exit interviews with students on the verge of graduation are an excellent way to get a view of your school from the student perspective. What were their most valuable experiences? What did they feel their experience may have lacked?
Exit interviews with families that are choosing not to re-enroll can result in some information about the family’s reasons for leaving and for choosing another school. However, because exit interviews are not anonymous, families usually don’t disclose their real issues with the school out of a desire to be nice. Thus, they will often state cost is the reason. (Our research has shown that cost is actually one of the least influential factors on the decision to leave.) Exit interviews with these families serve a valuable purpose; regardless of the family’s decision, you want to let them know you care about their child and that you’re interested in hearing their concerns. This helps maintain a positive relationship with the family so that they are more likely to speak well of the school to others, even if the school may not have been a good fit for their child.
Attrition Surveys
Attrition surveys are usually conducted electronically; the response rates tend to be higher than paper or phone surveys. We recommend that these be anonymous to yield more honest responses. They can be conducted by the school or by a third party. Families tend to give more direct feedback to third parties—even if a survey is said to be anonymous, respondents can be distrustful of a survey originating from the school.
The design of your survey is critical. A poorly designed survey can result in ambiguous, irrelevant, or unreliable data. If your school is designing the survey in-house, make sure that someone with a solid background in survey design is involved in the project. Below are a few tips for creating a quality attrition survey.
Short and to the point: Families leaving your school are less invested in responding and have less patience for a long survey than current parents, who believe that the time they invest can effect change for the better for their own children. For this reason, an attrition survey must be brief or parents won’t bother. Time yourself taking the survey. Ideally, you should be able to complete it in five to seven minutes, minus the time a parent may choose to answer an open-ended question.
Clear: Too often schools use vague questions that invite ambiguity. Your questions should give you answers that you can use. For example, if you provide a check-off list of reasons for leaving, and it contains something like “Academics are too rigorous/not rigorous enough” and “Too many/not enough specialists,” what does the response mean? Which is it? Too much or too little? You have no idea what the family meant by selecting that option.
Precise: Do not try to bundle factors into the same question. For example, if you ask parents to indicate agreement with the statement, “School lunches are tasty and nutritious,” the parent may not know how to answer if the lunches are tasty, but not nutritious, or vice versa.
Relevant: For each question, ask yourself, “How will I use the data that results from this?” Sometimes we’re tempted to ask questions out of curiosity or interest without any real purpose. Make sure you’re only asking questions that will result in usable data.
Include open-ended questions (but no more than two): Statistics are great, but, because of the relatively low number of responses typically obtained in an attrition survey (it is unlikely that 350 families left your school this year!), the raw numbers are less meaningful. Open-ended questions provide exploration to support the numerical data.
Done well, using a combination of exit interviews and attrition surveys on an annual basis is a valuable planning tool. Looking at trends over time will suggest data-based actions to take in terms of marketing your strengths, improving weak areas, and setting your strategic plan.
Additional ISM resources of interest
ISM Monthly Update for School Heads Vol. 11 No. 1 Surveys: What You Really Know Makes You Stronger
ISM Private School News Vol. 9 No. 11 Found Out What They Think Before They Leave the School
Surveys FAQ
Additional resources for ISM Consortium Gold Members
To The Point Vol. 7 No. 6 Put the Same Effort Into Keeping Students as You Do Into Finding Them
Ideas & Perspectives Vol. 34 No. 4 Family Satisfaction and Retention in the Current Economic Climate
Ideas & Perspectives Vol. 17 No. 2 Exit Interviews Gather Essential Information
