Why Your Kid Will Ask You to Fill Out an EPQ or School Survey (No Expert Knowledge Needed)
Last Tuesday, I was folding damp sweatshirts after dinner when my 16-year-old Lila leaned against the laundry room door, phone held out. “Mum, can you fill this survey for my EPQ? I need 40 responses and I’m stuck at 32. It takes five minutes, I promise.” I paused, mid-fold, and immediately thought the same thing half the parents I know think when they get this request: Wait, what even is her topic? Do I need to read her notes first to get it right? She laughed when I said that out loud. “No, you don’t need to know anything. It’s just questions about what your family does at dinner. Just answer honestly.”
I sat on the edge of the washing machine, clicked the link, and it was exactly what she said. 12 multiple choice questions, one tiny open text box at the end. It took me three minutes and 47 seconds – I checked the timer on my watch because I was waiting for the kettle to boil. I wrote in the open box that I hide my phone in a kitchen drawer but still sneak checks when I’m waiting for pasta to cook, clicked submit, and that was it.
I work part time as a form tutor at the local sixth form, so I hear this question all the time from other parents on the school run. “My son asked me to get 20 of my friends to fill his EPQ survey – is that allowed? Am I helping him cheat? I don’t know anything about his topic, will I mess it up?” It’s amazing how much unnecessary stress this tiny request causes, just because no one tells parents upfront what this is actually about.
EPQs, or Extended Project Qualifications, are extra projects sixth formers do to earn a qualification that counts toward university applications. Most students pick a topic they care about, and part of the assignment is collecting their own primary data, which usually means a survey. Nine times out of 10, they don’t need experts, they just need ordinary people to share their experiences. That’s why they say “no knowledge needed” – that’s not a generic line, it’s a literal statement of fact.
Last term, I had a Year 12 student in my form working on a project about how local communities support people living with dementia. She asked her grandma, who’d been visiting her husband in a dementia care home for two years, to fill out a short survey about visitor experiences. Her grandma refused for three weeks, saying she wasn’t a dementia expert, that her answers would be wrong, that she didn’t know enough to help. The student ended up scrambling to get responses from random strangers on a local Facebook group, which added way more stress than it needed. Her grandma’s lived experience was exactly what she needed for her data – no expertise required.
The thing I tell parents now is, there are three really simple rules that make this whole thing easy, no overthinking required. First, if they say no knowledge is needed, believe them. Just answer honestly, don’t sugar coat your answers and don’t Google anything. If the survey asks how often you recycle, and you sometimes forget to put your plastics out, say that. That’s good data, not wrong data. If it asks what you think about school uniform rules, and you hate them, say that. It doesn’t hurt your kid’s grade to have mixed responses – that’s actually what their teacher is looking for. Students aren’t out to get data that matches their hypothesis, they’re graded on how they analyze all the responses, even the ones that contradict what they thought.
Second, set clear boundaries if they ask you to share the survey with your contacts. It’s fine to say you’ll post it to one local parent group or ask three of your friends, but you don’t have to spam your entire work contact list or bother all your distant relatives at Christmas. Last month one mum told me her kid asked her to get 100 responses, she said she could comfortably get 20, and that was that. The kid adjusted his timeline and asked his dad to get the other 30, no drama.
Third, you’re not cheating. Teachers expect students to collect responses from people they know, that’s the whole point of learning how to run a small research project. The only time it’s cheating is if you write the whole project for them, which isn’t what this is. Filling a 5 minute survey is just helping someone get the data they need, same as holding a ladder for someone when they need to change a lightbulb.
It’s not just EPQs, either. Middle schoolers do surveys for geography projects, high schoolers do them for sociology class, it all works the same way. Lila got her draft feedback last week, her teacher said her survey data was really useful, and she’s on track to finish on time. I still couldn’t tell you what her final conclusion is going to be, and that’s okay. I did my three minutes of work, that’s all that was needed. Most days, the small asks from our kids aren’t as complicated as we make them. Next time I get a link to a survey, I’ll click it while I’m waiting for my coffee to brew, no overthinking. That’s enough.
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