Why Your Teen Might Ask You To Fill In Their School EPQ Survey (And What To Do Instead)
Last Tuesday, I was folding the week’s laundry after dinner, the smell of my daughter Lila’s unwashed hockey kit clinging to the bottom of the basket, when she leaned in the living room doorway, phone held out. “Mum, can you fill this in for my EPQ? Takes five minutes, you don’t need any prior knowledge.”
I was about to grab the phone. Lila had been panicking for three days about hitting her minimum response count, and I’d just finished a 10-hour day of parent-teacher conferences, so I was ready to click random options and get it off my plate. Then I stopped, because I remembered last term: Lila’s friend Mia did an EPQ on high street coffee shop waste, got 150 responses in 24 hours from friends and family spamming their groups, and her supervisor marked her down significantly. Half the responses came from people who’d never even stepped foot in the local coffee shops Mia was studying, just clicked through fast to help a kid out. All that work for useless data.
I leaned back against the couch and said, “Hang on. What’s your survey actually for?” Lila sighed, pushed off the doorframe, and explained her project is on parent perceptions of teen social media use. She thinks most parents assume teens scroll TikTok 24/7 and never use it for anything productive, but most of her friends use it to share study notes, revision tips, and even help with college application essays. She just needs people’s honest answers about what they think their own teen uses social media for.
“Okay, I’ll fill it in,” I said. “But I’m not clicking random answers, and when I share this to my groups, I’m not just spamming it for numbers. Let me do it my way.” As a primary school teacher, I see this all the time: parents rush through small, low-stakes school tasks like this to help their kid check a box. Everyone’s busy, and the EPQ feels like just another hoop to jump through before university applications, so why waste extra time on it? But the whole point of the EPQ isn’t the grade on the page—it’s the first time most teens get to do independent research on something they care about. If all your data is garbage, you don’t learn anything. If you get honest responses, even if you get fewer of them, you end up with actual results you can talk about.
Lila rolled her eyes and said she’d never hit her 80-response goal if I made people take longer, but she let me proceed. I filled my own response out first: I actually thought through each question, checked the box that matched my real experience (I know Lila uses TikTok for chemistry revision as much as she uses it for cat videos, so I wrote that honestly) instead of clicking through in 30 seconds. Then I shared it to my local neighborhood parent Facebook group, and instead of just posting “Please fill this out for my daughter’s homework, 5 minutes max,” I wrote: “This is for my 17-year-old’s EPQ on parent views of teen social media. She needs honest answers—12 multiple choice questions, takes about 7 minutes. No prior knowledge needed, just answer based on your own experience. Thanks so much.” I added the same note when I shared it to the WhatsApp group for parents of my former Year 6 class.
Within 48 hours, Lila had 118 responses. More than she needed. A lot of people even commented saying they didn’t mind taking the extra minute, it was an interesting topic that made them think about their own house rules.
When she started sorting through the data, she found way more than she expected. Most parents did underestimate how much teens use social media for school, which matched her initial hypothesis, but she also found a really interesting trend: parents of teens under 16 were way more likely to say they banned social media entirely than parents of older teens, but 70% of those same parents still said their teen accessed it regularly through friends’ devices anyway. That was a whole extra point she added to her final discussion section that she never would have found if half her responses were random clicks. She ended up getting a B, which is exactly what she was aiming for, and her supervisor specifically commented on how solid and reliable her raw data was.
It’s not a life-changing win or anything, just a small school project. But what stuck with me is how easy it is to fall into the trap of treating these small tasks as just another box to tick. When a kid says “fill this in, no knowledge needed,” my first instinct is to get it done as fast as possible. But it takes such a small amount of extra time to do it right, and it teaches them that the work they put in matters.
I’ve settled into three small, low-effort habits for these requests now that work well. First, I always ask one quick question about what the project is focused on before I fill anything out—it’s a 10-second check that reminds me to answer honestly instead of rushing. Second, when I share a survey to my groups, I always add that one line asking for honest answers, even if it takes a minute longer. Third, I remind my kid that 50 good responses are better than 100 useless ones, and most EPQ supervisors care more about how you analyze your data than how big your sample size is.
Last week, Lila helped her friend share an EPQ survey on teen attitudes to plant-based diets, and she made her friend add the same note about honest answers to the post. It’s not a big shift, just a small change to how we approach these little, easy-to-dismiss school tasks. We still get requests for EPQ surveys in the neighborhood group every other week now, and most people take the minute to answer properly. It’s not going to change anyone’s life trajectory, but it’s nice to see the kids actually get something useful out of their projects, instead of just crossing a line off their to-do list.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Why Your Teen Might Ask You To Fill In Their School EPQ Survey (And What To Do Instead)