How the Santua Index is calculated

What it is

The Santua Index is a single number between 0 and 100 that summarises everything a school's verified graduates and participants have said about it. It exists because a page full of 9.4s tells you nothing: almost every school scores in the nines, so the raw average separates no one. The index is built to be readable at a glance and hard to game.

The number is never the point on its own. Above it, every school page shows the three things students picked most often as the strongest part of the training, with the count beside each one. That is what actually tells you whether a school is right for you. The index is the summary; the dimensions and the reviews are the substance.

What goes into it

Every graduate and participant scores the training across up to ten dimensions, grouped into four pillars: teaching, transformation, what it opens for you afterwards, and trust. How many are asked depends on the kind of programme, because questions written for a 200 hour training make no sense after a weekend course. The index starts from the mean of those pillars on a 0 to 10 scale, and then four things shape it:

• ·Volume. A school with fifty verified reviews has proven more than a school with six. The index scales with how much evidence exists, up to a ceiling, so a school cannot sit at the top on a handful of reviews.
• ·Care. Schools that reply to their students publicly score higher. A school that never answers anyone is a school that stopped listening, and the index says so.
• ·Verification. Only verified reviews count. There is no other kind on Santua.
• ·Recency. A training that was excellent five years ago and has not been reviewed since is not the same evidence as one reviewed last month.

It is the same derivation the school itself sees inside Santua as its brand health, so there is no public number and private number. One calculation, shown to everyone.

Three levels: programme, kind of programme, school

A school is not one thing. A studio that runs a 200 hour teacher training, a few weekend retreats and a monthly class pass is running three different promises, and averaging them flat would describe none of them. So the index is built in three layers:

• ·A programme has its own index once it has five verified reviews of its own, from its own graduates.
• ·A kind of programme pools every programme of that kind in the school. That is what a programme page shows, labelled as such, when the programme itself is still too young to have its own.
• ·The school is the mean of those, weighted by how many verified reviews each kind actually has. A school with forty training reviews and three class reviews is about 93 percent its training index. A school that runs no retreats carries no retreat weight at all.

The weighting is the point. It means a school is never dragged down, or lifted up, by a part of its business that barely anyone has reviewed.

How much evidence the index needs

The index counts fully once a school has a year of verified voices for that kind of programme. Two things have to be true at once for a number to be worth trusting: it has to be statistically stable, and it has to describe the school as it is now rather than one lucky group years ago.

On stability: with the spread these reviews actually show, an average settles to within about a third of a point at 95 percent confidence somewhere around forty to fifty reviews. Below that the number still moves with each new voice. On currency: a school changes. The people teaching change. So the maturity clock only counts the last twelve months. Older reviews still count toward the score itself; they just stop counting toward how mature it is.

Those two conditions land on a different target for each kind of programme:

• ·Teacher trainings: 50 reviews. A training runs 15 to 40 students, once or twice a year, and about half leave a review. Fifty is roughly two full groups: a year of the school's real work.
• ·Short programmes and retreats: 30 reviews. These run 8 to 20 people at a time, several times a year, so thirty is the same year of voices at a smaller group size.
• ·Sessions: 30 reviews. Classes and memberships are individual and frequent, so the target is thirty within twelve months.

In one sentence: the index carries full weight when a school has a year of verified voices for that kind of programme.

The four pillars

Each pillar is shown as a band rather than a bar: Outstanding, Very high, High, or Being built. Hover or tap a band and it reveals the mean on a 0 to 10 scale, and how many reviews it rests on. Bands, not bars, because four bars invite you to compare tenths of a point that are not meaningfully different.

"Being built" is not a failing grade. It is what an honest page says about a pillar that has not gathered enough evidence yet, or where the school is genuinely still working. There are no negative badges on Santua.

What it deliberately is not

• ·It is not a ranking. Schools are never ordered against each other on a public page.
• ·It is not a per-review score. Individual reviewers' numbers stay private. Their words do not.
• ·It is not editable by the school. A school cannot hide a review, edit one, or choose who gets invited. It can reply, and replying counts in its favour.
• ·It does not exist below 5 verified reviews. Under that the page shows the count and the highlights and nothing else. No number, and no placeholder announcing its absence either.

Where the reviews come from

Only people whose enrolment and completion the school confirmed first are ever invited. One review per verified graduate, tied to their own completion record, on a link that cannot be reused or forwarded. The review text publishes automatically and unedited. The one thing that is not published is the improvement feedback, which every reviewer answers and which goes privately to the school.

Common questions