How St George's School piloted Trickle with support staff, then opened it up to every member of staff for the summer term - giving Senior Leadership real-time visibility into how staff were feeling, and staff the safety of anonymity to raise what genuinely mattered to them.
Pilot to full rollout. Trickle began as a focused pilot with support staff at St George's School in the spring term, before opening to all teaching and support staff for the summer term of the 2025/26 academic year.
Like many schools, St George's relied on staff meetings, surveys and line-management structures to understand how staff were really feeling. Those channels work well for some things, but concerns raised through them can lose clarity - or lose momentum entirely - as they travel up through a hierarchy of departments and teams.
Senior Leadership wanted a genuine, real-time channel to understand what staff were experiencing day to day, rather than relying solely on a periodic survey. They also wanted a way for every member of staff - including support teams working across different parts of the school day - to raise what was on their mind candidly, with the option of anonymity where that made speaking up easier.
St George's began with a focused pilot among support staff in the spring term, giving a smaller group the chance to try the platform and feed back directly on its value. Following a strongly positive response, Trickle was opened to all teaching and support staff for the summer term, with a Champions Team drawn from the school's leadership taking ownership of every issue raised.
Staff could raise a Trickle - the platform's term for an issue, question or idea brought to the school's attention - at any time, under their own name or anonymously. A Champion would then take ownership, work with staff to address it, and mark it complete once the necessary action had been taken. Most Trickles then went to a community vote - a chance for colleagues to endorse or challenge the Champion's resolution before it was formally closed - with recognition moments shared back to staff through ShoutAbout posts along the way.
"We've found Trickle genuinely useful - not just for gathering views, but for understanding which issues we thought we'd resolved but clearly hadn't. That visibility has been valuable for our Senior Leadership team."Carol Chandler-Thompson, Headteacher, St George's School
Participation built quickly once the pilot opened up. Across the pilot and the summer-term rollout combined, 113 of the 161 staff invited to Trickle signed up (70%), and 82 of them went on to actively contribute - raising a Trickle, commenting, or reacting - an Active Participation Rate of 73%.
Resolution was strong once issues were championed. Trickle Completion Rate reached 85%, comfortably ahead of the 61% platform average, with a 9-day median time to resolution.
Anonymity was used exactly as intended. 58% of Trickles were raised anonymously, and a third of all comments (33%) were posted anonymously too - most visibly on the trial's highest-engagement discussion around staff wellbeing, where anonymous voices carried some of the most direct commentary of the period. That balance, more staff choosing anonymity to raise an issue than to comment on one already in the open, is exactly the kind of candour the feature is designed to enable.
Sentiment pulses added a further layer of insight. Six MoodSense pulses ran across the trial, giving leadership a live read on staff sentiment around connection, culture and confidence in the plans ahead - insight that would previously have relied on a single end-of-year survey. When the Headteacher asked staff directly whether they'd like Trickle to continue for all staff next year, 90% said yes - the clearest possible signal that the trial had earned staff trust.
"The anonymity feature has made a real difference - staff have shared things they perhaps wouldn't have raised in a more formal setting, and that's helped us understand what's genuinely on people's minds."Carol Chandler-Thompson, Headteacher, St George's School
11 Trickles were fully resolved during the trial, each closing with a Champion-authored resolution and, in almost every case, a community vote. Five outcomes stood out.
A root-causes discussion on staff wellbeing became the trial's most active debate, resulting in a Champion commitment to feed the themes raised directly into next year's School Improvement Plan.
A staff-led proposal on qualification pathways sparked sustained, thoughtful debate, with the perspectives raised feeding directly into the school's ongoing curriculum planning.
Support staff, spread across the school with no shared break pattern, asked for an informal space to connect - and got one: a recurring weekly meet-up, agreed at no cost to the school.
Staff shared wide-ranging experience on mobile phone use across different types of school trip, converging on the need for clearer, more consistent guidance - now being written up for staff.
Feedback from pupils naming their teachers as their favourite thing about the school was turned into a public ShoutAbout post, closing the loop between pupil voice and staff recognition.
Following the strength of the trial - and staff's clear appetite to continue - St George's has committed to Trickle for all teaching and support staff across the 2026/27 academic year, building directly on the Champions Team and processes established during the pilot.
The St George's experience reflects what schools consistently tell us Trickle gives them:
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