Teacher Tapp is a free, daily survey app which gives teachers a platform to share their unfiltered voice, painting an accurate and ever evolving picture of the education world. It provides valuable insights into the trends in the teaching community in the UK and USA.

To celebrate this collaboration, HUE is sponsoring the November 2024 prize draw in the Teacher Tapp app where, as well as takeaway vouchers, you can win a HUE HD Pro document camera/visualizer. You will be automatically entered into the prize draw by creating an account in the app.

How does it work?

✅️ Answer 3 quick questions daily (takes under a minute), and instantly compare your answers with teachers nationwide.
✅️ Stay in the know and gain powerful insights to improve your practice.
✅️ Make a difference – your voice feeds directly into education research that policymakers can’t ignore.

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This article was provided by Teacher Tapp.

Professor Becky Allen and Laura McInerney, founders of Teacher Tapp.

Teacher Tapp has arrived in the USA

It’s not hard to understand why the document camera/visualizer is such a popular piece of kit: it allows a whole class to have one person’s viewpoint. Zooming in on the page in real-time gives useful insights and a better understanding of what’s going on.

And with my old English-teacher hat on, I can’t help but think that in lots of ways it’s the perfect metaphor for Teacher Tapp. If you don’t know Teacher Tapp, we’re a free, daily survey app for teachers. Just like the document camera, our questions allow us to ‘zoom in’ on what’s going on in classrooms, and give us the chance to share with everyone the insights and better understanding of how educators are working.

What insights have we found?

Every day, more than 11,000 teachers tap their answers to three questions in our app, and as a result, we know how many teachers have work emails on their personal phones (80%), how many teachers are told to mark in specific colours (72%) and even how many of those have MULTIPLE colours to remember to use (15%!).

For practical, operational insights – Teacher Tapp is able to check if changes being rolled out by the government, for example, are actually being implemented. For example, during the pandemic, schools in England were sent CO2 monitors – but did everyone receive them? Because of Teacher Tapp, we know that 25% did not.

Trends over time

Sometimes things will start to change in your school – perhaps it’s that you find corridor misbehaviour has suddenly stepped up, or that more children are shouting out answers – and you might wonder ‘is this just me?’.

At Teacher Tapp we’ve been asking questions about behaviour regularly since 2017, and this means we’re able to spot trends starting or pick up on increasing problems.

Since 2018, we’ve been regularly asking about the impact of student lateness and lesson absence on lessons. When we first asked, 9% of primary teachers strongly agreed that this interfered with their teaching, and 18% of secondary teachers felt the same.

In the last academic year, this had risen to 19% in primary and 36% in secondary. The increase can be tracked over the pandemic and it is clinging on – putting figures to that feeling that since the schools returned to full-time face-to-face learning, attendance has become a growing concern.

Other trends can be tracked too – for example, the increase in girls soccer teams (or as we call it – football!).

Since 2022 there has been an increase in both primary and secondary schools with girls football teams. Younger girls have seen an increase from 35% to 38% in just two years and for older girls a similar increase from 56% to 64% across the same period.

These sorts of insights can track the small shifts in behaviours that point towards larger changes in society.

The things that keep us going…

The big aim here at Teacher Tapp is to try and help teachers stay in the classroom – so we’re very interested in asking questions about commitment to teaching and finding out what those teachers excited to be in the classroom have in common.

Teachers who believe they’re a much better teacher now than last year were much more likely to be looking forward to the new school year than teachers who believed they had got worse (63% vs 33%). 

This is a super useful insight for any line manager to have because it shows that the hard work you put into line managing teachers can directly impact how they feel about coming to school and teaching. Senior and middle leaders take note!

At Teacher Tapp, we’re like the classroom camera that displays mistakes, potential misconceptions, and correct answers for everyone to learn from. We’re sharing the “working out” that’s essential for running a successful school and identifying areas where education could use support.

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