Producing easy to understand funding line names

Background

During our alpha phase, the prototype we built pulled funding line names directly from the Calculate funding service (CFS). When we tested the prototype with users, they told us they didn’t recognise some of the funding line names shown on screen, while others contained confusing terminology.

Before we could come up with a funding line naming approach that made sense to users, we wanted to see how funding lines are currently named in adult funding statements, and whether there is a consistent approach to naming.

Some initial assumptions

We began by seeing what we could uncover to help us understand whether:

• naming conventions exist for funding lines within the Calculate Funding Service (CFS)
• these naming conventions are consistently followed
• policy exists that should dictate these naming conventions - a 'source of truth'
• external guidance exists on GOV.UK that references funding lines by name
• internal guidance for CFS exists that references funding lines by name
• funding line names in CFS are consistent with guidance and policy

Our starting points

The first step was to identify our key sources, based on the assumptions. We thought they should include:

• relevant policy papers
• internal guidance for CFS users
• external guidance on GOV.UK
• live statements published on Manage your Education and Skills Funding (MYESF)

We also compared the funding line names used in CFS with those displayed in our alpha prototype.

A spreadsheet was used to record our findings and allowed easy comparison across our sources.

Validating our sources

Conversations with colleagues in Operational Excellence and Run and Refine confirmed:

• there were no policy sources – the funding rules were the closest alternative
• the relevant internal guidance could be found in the CFS calculation standard
• external guidance was gathered in the adult education and skills funding collection, with the most important pages being:
  • adult allocations
  • technical guidance

Our content review

External guidance

We looked at GOV.UK guidance that was:

• identified by Operational Excellence
• linked from the current live statements in MYESF
• found by searching directly on GOV.UK

We looked for any references to the funding line names we’d seen in CFS and the live statements and added them to the spreadsheet for comparison.

We also identified some (currently out of scope) issues with the guidance journey for users and recorded these for teams to consider later.

Internal guidance

The CFS calculation standard contains a section called 'Naming structure for calculations and funding lines', which provides a convention for naming funding lines. This is set out as: [Policy] _ [Element] _ [Value].

To see if this convention was being followed, and if it created any challenges, we looked at where internal operators construct their funding templates in CFS.

Our findings

General

We found the following issues with funding line names:

• the naming of funding lines and terminology in guidance and allocation statements is inconsistent; we found, for example, that:
  • prefixes such as ‘DFE funded’ are used in some cases, but not all
  • terminology such as ‘contract’, ‘grant’ and ‘of which’ is used in guidance and CFS but not in live statements
  • terms such as ‘loan’ and ‘loans’ are used interchangeably
  • funding line names change between statement versions – for example the word ‘indicative’ appears one year but not in others
• they do not always meet GDS standards; for example, we saw that inconsistent capitalisation was an issue
• the names do not always match up easily across the sources
• there does not appear to be a 'single source of truth'

CFS calculation standard

• the naming convention is not being applied to funding line names, although it is being used for some (but not all) calculation line names
• the calculation standard seems to be designed to ensure that coding and calculations work, rather than generating funding line names that are easier for users to understand

Initial recommendations

• Funding line names should be consistent across environments, and meet GDS style standards to ensure ease of understanding and accessibility
• Naming conventions need to be agreed with users of CFS to ensure they can create funding line names that meet the required standards

We used our findings as starting points for follow-up conversations and a workshop with Operational Excellence users of CFS; we’ve written a design history that provides more information on what we learned and took forward into prototype design.

Designing human-readable funding line names

Next, we used the outputs from our workshop and conversations to validate our earlier assumptions.

We’d discovered that we could not easily change the naming conventions for Operational Excellence users of CFS, because they were constrained by technical issues such as:

• duplication – each funding line name had to be unique in calculations, but we needed some funding lines to display in the same way to providers
• character limits for funding line names – there was an upper limit after which the name would become difficult to read in CFS and identify correctly

These issues meant that we could not change funding line names in CFS to be easily understood and used in the data-driven statement.

After further joint investigations by the design and technical teams, we recommended the introduction of a new field in CFS – the external funding line name. This would solve 2 problems:

• it resolved the issues around duplication and character limits
• it would allow the data-driven statement to display some information-type funding lines – we’d been unable to get the API to pull these through in the alpha prototype

A change in focus

Introducing the external funding line name field meant a change of focus for this content design task. Instead of creating naming conventions, it made more sense to create guidance for using the new field and produce a set of exemplars or recommended funding line names for adult statements. We could also test these in upcoming user research.

To ensure we were providing our Operational Excellence users with guidance they could use and store easily, we asked for input from the DfE design community and the Calculations Community of Practice (CoP) (the user group who will own this guidance going forward). They expressed a preference for it to be published in a Word document to be kept in their team SharePoint folder. 

Our first iteration, based on the workshop findings, was shown at a check-in meeting with our senior contact in Operational Excellence. Their feedback was generally positive and consisted of some minor edits and requests to make content changes that were previously planned.

After making these changes, we showed the next iteration to the Calculations CoP. Their feedback was also positive.

However, there were more challenges from the Adult Funding Technical Advisory Group. Most of their concerns related to future scalability and the wider impacts of changing funding line names - what would this mean for other communications? We will take these into consideration as we develop our product, but finding answers is out of scope for this beta.

We did make 2 changes based on their feedback:

• we reworked the guidance document to make it clear that it only covers the external funding line name field in CFS, not all external uses of funding line names
• we updated the ‘adult skills core’ funding line name to ‘adult skills fund core’, so that it is not confused with the wider area of adult skills funding

Once we’ve tested the funding line names with users, we will iterate the guidance further and share it with Operational Excellence and other stakeholders.