Most participation platforms give you a login and leave you to it. We do it differently. Every school that joins Choice Voting gets hands-on onboarding, exemplar policies and frameworks, a ready-made participation calendar, benchmarking against other schools, and a named support contact who picks up the phone.
YOUR FIRST YEAR
Wonde integration, contacts imported
Election, survey or consultation live
Engagement policy, communication policy
Year-round participation plan in place
See how you compare to similar schools
Full review, next year planned together
We do not send you a PDF manual and wish you luck. Your onboarding is a guided walkthrough with a named member of the Choice Voting team. We set up your account, connect your MIS through Wonde (one click, no IT department needed), import your parent and staff contact lists, and walk you through launching your first event.
The whole process takes under an hour of your time. Most schools have their first election, survey or consultation live within two weeks of signing up.
We configure your school, connect your MIS, and import your contacts.
We walk you through creating and launching your first election, survey or consultation.
Your stakeholders receive their first invitation. You see responses in real time.
One of the biggest challenges schools face with stakeholder engagement is knowing what to run and when. It is easy to default to a single annual parent survey and nothing else. That is not what Ofsted or your governing body expects.
We help you map what you already do, identify gaps, and build a year-round engagement plan covering every stakeholder group across every term. You get an exemplar annual participation calendar to start from. You can adopt it as it stands or adapt it to fit your school's priorities. Either way, you start with a plan, not a blank page.
Autumn 1
Autumn 2
Spring 1
Spring 2
Summer 1
Summer 2
Schools tell us one of the hardest parts of stakeholder engagement is knowing what policies and frameworks should be in place. The DfE governance guides expect governing bodies to have documented systems and processes for seeking stakeholder views. Ofsted inspectors look for evidence that engagement is structured and purposeful, not ad hoc.
We provide exemplar documents that you can adopt or adapt:
A framework for how your school seeks, captures and acts on the views of parents, staff, pupils and governors. Maps directly to the DfE requirement that schools "regularly seek and consider the views of, and feed back to, parents, carers, pupils, staff."
How your school communicates decisions back to stakeholders. Covers the "feeds back to" part of the DfE expectation and the You Said We Did cycle.
How your governing body accesses and uses stakeholder data from the platform. Covers the DfE requirement for governors to have access to "objective, high quality and timely data."
A structured plan for what engagement activities happen each term, which stakeholder groups are covered, and how outcomes are reported to the governing body.
These are exemplar documents provided as a starting point. They should be reviewed and adapted to reflect your school's specific context and governance arrangements. They do not constitute legal advice.
How do you know if a 62% parent response rate is good? Is your staff wellbeing score above or below what other schools are seeing? Are you running more or fewer engagement activities than similar schools in your area?
We draw on our experience across hundreds of schools to give you context. No individual school data is ever shared. What you see are patterns, averages and ranges that help you understand where you are strong and where there is room to improve.
Your benchmarking data shows you where your engagement sits relative to schools of a similar size, phase and type.
The DfE governance guides require governing bodies to "identify ways to validate and cross-reference the data provided by the executive leadership." Benchmarking gives them exactly that: an external reference point for the engagement data your school produces.
ENGAGEMENT BENCHMARKING
Every school gets an annual review before their subscription renews. This is not a sales call. It is a structured review of how you used the platform across the year, what worked well, what you could do more of, and what your priorities should be for the year ahead.
We look at your participation data, your engagement trends, your response rates across stakeholder groups, and how your You Said We Did outcomes have landed. If there are features you have not used, we show you how. If your governing body wants a specific report format, we help you set it up.
You leave the review with a clear plan for the next academic year and confidence that your subscription is delivering value.
ANNUAL REVIEW SUMMARY
You are not submitting a ticket to a queue. Every school has a named support contact at Choice Voting. Phone, email, or video call. If you are running a parent governor election for the first time, we walk you through it. If your governing body wants a specific report, we help you build it. If you need to set up a staff consultation at short notice, we are there.
We walk you through the first one of everything. After that, you will not need us for most things. But we are always there when you do.
Call your named contact directly during school hours.
Responses within one working day, usually much faster.
Screen-share sessions for anything you want to see done step by step.
This is not a tool that does one thing. Choice Voting handles elections, surveys, consultations, polls and votes across every stakeholder group in your school. Here is what you can run:
Nominations, ballots, returning officer tools, and results. Fully compliant with DfE regulations.
Learn moreParent satisfaction, staff wellbeing, curriculum feedback, policy consultations. Auto-scheduled, anonymised, with trend analysis.
Learn moreWellbeing checks, curriculum feedback, SEND and inclusion surveys, student voice programmes.
Coming soonStudent council elections, head boy/girl, charity of the year, event feedback, quick-fire votes.
Coming soonAt the end of each academic year, the platform produces a signed annual stakeholder engagement report. This is the document you take to your governing body, share with your head teacher, and have ready when inspectors arrive.
It brings together everything in one place: engagement rates by stakeholder group, trend analysis across the year, safeguarding and wellbeing indicators, You Said We Did outcomes, and a governor oversight summary. It is timestamped, signed, and audit-trailed.
"The governing body must accurately document evidence of the governing body and its committees' discussions and decisions; any evaluation of the governing body's impact."
DfE Maintained Schools Governance Guide, updated June 2025
See exactly what your governing body receives. This sample report uses fictional data for Westfield Academy.
Book a demo and we will walk you through the platform, the support package, and what your first year looks like. No pressure, no hard sell. Just a conversation about what stakeholder engagement could look like in your school.
