Cognita uses the Voice of the Student to Drive Wellbeing at School

Independent schools group Cognita is leading the way in delivering a better student experience by implementing a dedicated Voice of the Student (VoS) program across its 69 schools using the Confirmit Horizons platform.

Cognita is responsible for the care and education of over 35,000 students worldwide and is using the VoS program to focus on student wellbeing. The program has now been implemented across all Cognita schools in Europe, Latin America and South-East Asia.

Using Confirmit Horizons to run the program, Cognita is able to gather detailed feedback about how safe and secure students feel in each environment. Confirmit Active Dashboards is then used to share insight with head teachers, safeguarding advisors and education directors, all of whom can access data on demand, whenever they need to and wherever they are located.

Stephan Hogenbirk, Customer Experience Program Manager at Cognita, explains: “We want to be confident that all our students feel safe in school and, most importantly, that they know who to talk to if they have worries. The feedback we gather has allowed us to improve our curriculum and programs to focus even more on student wellbeing, as well as enabling individual schools to more clearly identify and address the needs of the different age groups we cater for.”

Cognita has already proven the value of feedback in the education sector, having established programs for the Voice of the Employee (VoE), capturing feedback from school directors, teachers and support staff, and Voice of the Parent (VoP), a tailored customer experience program that uses parental feedback to drive consistency and improvement around the world.

The VoS program gathers feedback from students in eight countries and supports four languages, which means the platform Cognita selected had to be capable of supporting multi-lingual, multi-region surveys. Confirmit Horizons allows Cognita to capture information from all students and then deliver data in a consistent format and common language for reporting and action.

The Horizons platform also delivers real-time alerting, allowing Cognita to act directly on alerts triggered from the survey and engage in conversation with the individual student if necessary.

Hogenbirk says: “The alerting capabilities of the program have been critical in not only allowing us to look at the wellbeing of our students on a global, regional and school level, but also at an individual level. Our staff are now empowered to engage more proactively with students. This also allows our students to feel they have more of a voice and take ownership of the issues that are most important to them.”

Tim Hannington, EVP at Confirmit, says: “Cognita is a shining example of a forward-thinking organization that understands the value of feedback and the impact it can have for improvement across the board. Giving students a voice in the same way that customers have a voice in other sectors is a real innovation, and has already proven its value for Cognita through metrics such as enjoyment of school and better teacher-student engagement.

“We look forward to continuing our work with Cognita across all their feedback programs and demonstrating how successful organizations can be when they listen to the combination of voices that drive them.”