In sprint 1, we started to gather information on how we communicate funding allocations and payment information for all of the funding types that currently go through the funding service. This is currently over 40 different types of funding.
The ESFA Operational Excellence team is organised into 3 teams:
pre-16 funding
16 to 19 funding
adult funding
Each team deals with their own specific funding streams.
When we mapped which types of education providers could receive which types of funding, we demonstrated that some providers receive funding from more than one of these teams. For example a local authority maintained school with a sixth form who provide some adult education will receive:
pupil premium funding, dealt with by the pre 16 team
16 to 19 funding, dealt with by the 16 to 19 team
Adult skills funding, dealt with by the adult team
Different methods of communication are used for different funding types. This means that an education providers experience of finding out their funding allocations and payment schedules will depend on which funding types they receive. And which funding types they receive depends on which type of provider type they are – for example an academy, a local authority maintained school or a college.
Being user centric is one of the ESFA behaviours, as outlined in the ESFA business plan. To put our users at the heart of our work, we’ll be organising our thinking around how the education providers experience funding, rather than how ESFA is organised.
The Funding Service strategy also outlines that we will “champion the provider viewpoint...to identify how our existing services can be improved.”
As is normal for discoveries, as we learned more about the problem, we also began to narrow our focus. We went through a process to ensure we’re focusing on the right areas where we can add value.
We listed all of our assumptions about users experience and internal processes.
We recorded what we already knew, from pre existing user research and analysis.
We outlined what was still unknown.
We prioritised the unknowns by what would be most impactful to find out.
Through this process we realised that finding out all of the unknowns for all funding types and education provider types was too big a scope. We considered different ways of “slicing” the problem into a more manageable size. We decided to focus on one provider type, and the funding types they receive. This means we can fully understand that provider type’s experience and how we can improve it.
The provider type we chose is academies because:
they are a large proportion of providers- and this proportion is ever increasing as more local authority schools convert to academies
we've identified that they have to use at least 4 different platforms to find out their funding allocations and payment schedules – and so have one of the most fragmented experiences of all provider types
this will still cover a large amount of funding streams – including ones looked after by the pre 16, 16 to 19 and adult operational excellence teams
this fits in with the work of the schools account programme team to make it easier for academies to find the information they need from DfE
We’ll be looking at both the experience of external users, and the internal processes for communicating allocations and payment schedules.
What we learn from focusing on the academies, we’ll be able to apply to other provider types in the future. Much of our discovery methodology would be reusable for future discoveries for other provider types. Most of the funding types that go to academies also go to other provider types, and so the processes for these funding streams will already have been mapped.
Our problem statements
We have 2 problem statements for our discovery, to cover the problem from both the external user and internal process perspectives.
- Users with responsibilities for finance in academies need to know how much funding they will receive. This allows them to budget, forecast and ensure cashflow.
These users lack certainty on the funding allocation and payments they will receive. They find it complex to work out.
This discovery aims to:
map how users find out their funding allocations and payment schedules
understand users experience and what would give them certainty
make recommendations for improvements
How might we give users certainty on the funding and payments they will receive?
- ESFA communicates funding allocations and payment information to academies.
The current processes for communicating them are complex, time consuming and expensive.
This discovery aims to:
map current processes for generating allocation statements and payment information
understand constraints
make recommendations for improvements
How might we make processes for communicating allocations and payment information efficient and simple?