LEAD School Effectiveness Surveys 2025
Listen. Evaluate. Act. Deliver.
Independent Schools Victoria's LEAD School Effectiveness Surveys are an essential school improvement tool, developed especially for Independent schools.
The full suite of LEAD surveys provide a powerful measure of school effectiveness, enabling you to review your school’s performance benchmarked against other Independent schools.
With valuable data from students, staff and parents, our LEAD surveys enable you to make informed decisions based on actionable insights from your school community.
- Gain a comprehensive insight of your school’s effectiveness through the eyes of students, staff and parents.
- Internally benchmark your school to measure and monitor growth and make data-informed decisions.
- Externally benchmark your school against a segmented group of similar schools, as well as almost 400,000 respondents over the last 10 years.
- Interrogate your data and construct timely visual stories with isAnalyse via isEducation, ISV’s custom-built interactive dashboard.
- Gain key insights into core elements of school effectiveness, using survey instruments validated by the University of Cambridge.
“It's really important to understand where you sit within the sector and, in particular, against like-for-like schools. ISV's LEAD surveys enable us to understand the feedback within our own context, but also where we sit against other schools.”
— Nikki Kirkup, Principal, The Knox School
What does LEAD measure?
Leverage the full suite of LEAD surveys
ISV’s LEAD Student Satisfaction Survey measures satisfaction levels of your school’s important stakeholders – students.
It gathers recommendations for improving the quality of education and other important aspects of schooling, including:
- Academic program
- Learning outcomes
- Quality of teaching
- Pastoral care
- Discipline and safety
- Peer relationships and more.
The insights gained can inform future planning, resource allocation and provide valuable information to support the cycle of continuous improvement.
Year 12 students have a unique view on the strengths of your school. A positive experience in the final years can influence a student’s performance in further education and the workforce, which reflect positively (or negatively) on your school.
The Year 12 Exit Survey can help you track student satisfaction across a range of areas, including:
- Academic program
- Teaching quality
- Learning outcomes
- Personal development
- Pastoral care
- Post-school education plans
- Career interests and more.
ISV’s LEAD Staff Satisfaction Survey gives you powerful insights into your workforce. The survey aims to provide a better understanding of staff views on the quality of your school’s education program and work environment.
These valuable insights can lead to improvements in:
- School effectiveness
- Student achievement
- The culture and philosophy of your school
- Leadership and morale
- Staff retention
- Change management and strategy.
ISV’s LEAD Parent Satisfaction Survey gives you powerful insights from one of your school’s most important stakeholders, helping you gain a better understanding of their views on the quality of their child’s schooling.
It evaluates parent satisfaction levels with important aspects of schooling, including:
- Academic program
- Teaching quality
- Learning outcomes
- Pastoral care
- Discipline and safety
- Parental involvement and more.
ISV’s LEAD Governance Survey gives you powerful insights into the operation of your school’s board. It supports school boards to examine their performance against best practice governance principles and to identify their strengths and weaknesses.
It covers the four critical functions of a school board:
- Setting direction
- Procedures
- Performance
- Capability.
This can lead to improvements in board effectiveness, communication between board members and stronger school governance.
Schools are encouraged to participate in the full suite of surveys to gain a holistic view of their performance (and save 50 per cent or more on the price of individual surveys). You can also participate in any number of individual surveys.
“Braemar College has used the LEAD survey since 2009… having a benchmark of the surveys and being able to pick trends over time is really important.”
— Russell Deer, Principal, Braemar College
What's new for LEAD in 2025?
We’ve been working hard behind the scenes to enhance our LEAD School Effectiveness Surveys so you can:
- Access more data than ever before with our new LEAD Survey App
- Analyse and compare perceptions of students, parents and staff with our new holistic dashboard
- Observe the correlation between multiple variables over a specific time range
- Gauge the tone of respondents’ comments with automated sentiment analysis
- Enjoy an improved user experience with our upgraded interface.
All of these enhancements will unlock our future capabilities for tailored insights and predictive analysis.
How are schools using LEAD to improve?
Last year we asked participating schools how they’re using LEAD to inform school improvement. We found that:
- 98% investigated areas of concern
- 81% informed strategic planning
- 69% improved communication to stakeholders
- 58% improved school performance
- 58% changed processes.
On a 0-10 scale, those surveyed were highly satisfied with ISV’s LEAD School Effectiveness Surveys (8.1 out of 10) and were strongly likely to recommend it to other schools (8.0 out of 10).
Survey conducted in April 2023 among LEAD schools 2019-2022 (n=26)
More information
Expressions of interest to participate in the 2025 surveys are set to commence the week of 28 April.
For participating schools, this year’s surveys will launch on Monday 12 August.