This is an example of a questionnaire that has worked well to provide evidence to assess that the borough’s parks provision. It was responded to by nearly all the borough’s green space friends groups. Thanks to the forum at Haringey for providing this example.
Friends Group: [free text entry]
Green Space: [free text entry]
Q1 How would you have rated key aspects of your green space?
1 = Poor, 2 = Inadequate 3= Adequate 4= Excellent
a. Staffing Presence
b. Maintenance (including litter, flower beds, play equipment, grass-cutting etc)
c. Management (including decision-making, coordination, action when needed, relations with Friends etc)
d. Infrastructure Repairs (buildings, structures, etc)
e. Safety (eg anit-social behaviour)
Q2 Since [the cuts in 20XX] how have key aspects fared?
a. Staffing Presence
b. Maintenance (including litter, flower beds, play equipment, grass-cutting etc)
c. Management (including decision-making, coordination, action when needed, relations with Friends etc)
d. Infrastructure Repairs (buildings, structures, etc)
e. Safety (eg anti-social behaviour)
Q3 If standards have declined, please provide more information on problems you face:
a. Staffing Presence
[ text entry ]
b. Maintenance (including litter, flower beds, play equipment, grass-cutting etc)
[ text entry ]
c. Management (including decision-making, coordination, action when needed, relations with Friends etc)
[ text entry ]
d. Infrastructure Repairs (buildings, structures, etc)
[ text entry ]
e. Safety (eg anti-social behaviour)
[ text entry ]
Q4 What actions do you think would improve the situation significantly?
a. Adequate and long-term revenue (staffing) funding for our parks service
b. On-site staffing in all substantial green spaces, backed up by effective ‘back-room’ officers
c. Ongoing capital investment for improvements etc
d. Aspiration that all [Your council name] public green spaces achieve Green Flag standards
e. Effective protection for all [Your council name] public green spaces eg though ‘in perpetuity’ covenants
f. Community involvement & empowerment taking on board the views of Friends groups & the forum
A5. What maintenance, if any, is your Group systematically doing in your green space?
Answers a-e answers have the scale: 1 = once a year 2 = once a month 3 = once a week 4=daily (nb: you might need to increase this scale to include once every quarter of a year though this would be inconsistant with the other question scales)
a.Litter picking
b.Flower beds or woodland maintenance
c.Managing / staffing a buidling
d.Other (please specify and add detail)
e. Is this effort by your group
1= difficult for us to keep up throughout the year and throughout future years
2= something that parks staff should be doing if there were enough of them
3= about the right level of active involvement
4= quite easy and we want to do more
Q6 What is your general experience with being able to contact, liaise with, and work in partnership with paid staff (where they exist)?
These answers have the scale: 1= Excellent easy to do 2= Good 3= OK 4=Poor
a. Parks Service grounds workers
b. Leisure Service office-based staff
Q7 Has your space faced a threat of inappropriate development or commercialisation?
YES / NO
Q8 Would make any other comments relevant to the Review?
[ text entry ]
Here is the document that summarised the results. Note: if the survey is conducted using Survey Monkey’s free account, then it will draw up easily read charts of your results (see the examples in example-questionnaire-to-demonstrate-park-usage post):
Haringey FriendsQuestionnaireResults2017
