Entry guidelines
Here are some tips to help you prepare your entry for The PIEoneer Awards:
• The awards are free to enter and you can enter up to three categories per organisation.
• You can nominate your own or another organisation, although the vast majority of entries we receive are self-nominations. The only exception to this is the Outstanding contribution to the industry award, which cannot be a self-nomination.
• The work/project/initiative being entered, or some part of the work / project / initiative, must have taken place between 1st January 2023 and 31st December 2023 (inclusive). The PIEoneer of the year award and Outstanding contribution to the industry have no timeframe attached. In the International alum of the year category, the alum should have graduated from 2020 onwards. Emerging Leader of the year category, we accept nominations about individuals who have worked in the global education industry for 8 years or less.
• Each question is weighted the same, so give equal thought and attention to every question.
• Be specific when answering questions and don't repeat answers across different questions.
• If you wish to add video links to your entry, you can do so within the body of your answers but we cannot guarantee that they will be viewed in full by the shortlisting panel or judges. To add a video link, please include the full URL, not an embedded link.
• We recommend you provide different types of evidence to support your answers, give broader context to your work and demonstrate its impact - quantitative and qualitative, testimonials, and statistics from e.g. Google analytics and social media platforms.
• We are looking for evidence of excellence and innovation, so consider both the content of your answers in terms of what you delivered, as well as how well it has been presented and evidenced. Scores will be equally weighted accordingly.
• Don't go over the word limit - anything over 250 words per question won't be read.
• When completing your entry form(s), please be aware that formatting from Word won't transfer onto the online form. This includes styled content, such as bold and underlining. If you prefer to prepare your entry offline and then copy and paste your answers into the online form, we suggest you do this using plain text from either TextEdit or Notepad.
• You can save your form and edit it as much as you like before the entry deadline by saving it on your online account – you don’t have to complete it in one go.
This is how the scoring works:
• A team of PIE staff and industry experts will put together a shortlist of finalists for each category by reviewing and scoring the information provided on the entry forms. A maximum of nine shortlisted finalists for each award will be selected.
• Each question has an equal weighting and will be scored out of a maximum 10 points. The scores for each question are added together and the entries with the highest cumulative scores in each category will be selected as finalists.
• Our panel of expert judges, all of whom are independent of The PIE, will be split into groups according to their areas of expertise to score the finalists' entries in selected categories.
• They will score in the same way - by giving a score out of 10 to each question. The entry with the highest cumulative score across all the judges will be selected as the winner for that category. If there is more than one entry with the highest cumulative score, they will be selected as joint winner. The entries with the second and/or third highest cumulative scores will be selected as highly commended finalists.
• If there is a conflict of interest between entries and judges, judges will not score that entry/category, as appropriate.