Contacts have been a tricky area on this project.
At first, we only captured contact details that the delivery officers and caseworkers needed to manage the project.
Later, we found out that administrative and funding teams in DfE and the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) need the contact details of specific people at the schools, academies, trusts, local and national government.
Different types of contacts
There are 2 types of contacts:
- people at or who legally represent the school, academy, trusts, diocese and local authority who caseworkers and delivery officers talk to about the project
- people in specific roles at the school, academy, trusts, local authority and the local MP who must receive legal paperwork from ESFA and DfE
Sometimes those contacts overlapped, but often they do not.
Caseworkers and delivery officers have contacts at the various organisations involved in a conversion or transfer. The jobs those people have can change from project to project.
For example, the person they will ask questions to at an incoming trust may be the CEO in one project. It might be the business development manager next time.
One project might have the school's headteacher as the main point of contact for all questions about the project. At another school it might be the school secretary.
They may never have any need to contact the people that the administrative and funding teams must send legal letters to.
Pulling contact information from other sources
We initially tried pulling that contact information needed by funding and administrative teams from other sources, including a database of MPs and from Get information about schools.
However, we found that was not always accurate. This meant that contact details those teams needed were missing or incorrect in exports.
Contacts that must be sent legal documents
The contacts the funding and administrative teams need to send legal letters to are:
- headteacher of the academy
- incoming trust CEO
- outgoing trust CEO (transfers only)
- chair of governors (conversions only)
These contacts could be added to the project in Complete by a caseworker or delivery officer.
In truth, they're often known while a project is in Prepare.
If it's an application to convert then some of them will often be known at the point the application is made.
This is something that can improve as we develop the ability to pass information between Prepare and Complete.
However, because they're not always somebody a delivery officer of caseworker speaks to when managing the project, it's not guaranteed they will know them and not required that they are added in order to complete a project.
Also, roles such as the headteacher can change during a project. People can forget to update that if it's not a contact they need to use.
This means there's a chance that the contact details are not always correct when the admin and funding teams check the exports.
With no fully reliable single source of truth for contact details we could import to Complete, we only really had one option.
We needed to design tasks to confirm these contacts.
Organisational needs and user needs
We have a bit of complexity here.
It feels like an additional burden on delivery officers and caseworkers to enter information they will not necessarily use, but they are best placed to provide that information to the department for others to use.
Deciding on a source of truth
Delivery officers and caseworkers can already enter contact details for anyone they need to.
However, to ensure the administrative and funding teams got the contacts they required, we needed to design a way for those contacts to get into the exports they use because what we had designed already was not quite working for those teams.
Caseworkers and delivery officers are best placed to know the latest contact information or to find it out, so we needed them to enter and confirm the details for the contacts who needed the legal documentation.
Creating tasks to confirm contact details
We added tasks to the task list to enable delivery officers and caseworkers to confirm the details for these essential contacts.
We placed the tasks in the "Project kick-off" section of the task list as confirming these contacts can help to ensure the data in the export is correct when the admin and funding teams come to use it later on.
The tasks change depending on whether the project is a conversion or transfer.
A conversion will ask for:
- headteacher
- incoming trust CEO
- chair of governors
A transfer will ask for:
- headteacher
- incoming trust CEO
- outgoing trust CEO
If one of those contact categories have not been added, the tasks direct the user to add them.
When they add the contact, they are asked whether the contact is one of the essential contacts the funding and administrative teams need, or someone else.
If it is one of the essential contacts, they will be given the relevant job title and that will not be able to be changed.
Once the contact has been added, it can be confirmed.
If that contact has already been entered, then they will appear in the list to confirm.
This list also helps to confirm which headteacher is the headteacher to add if there is more than one.
For example, if there is a job share or if the current headteacher is leaving once the academy opens.
Checking with users
We have run through these tasks and the data they output into the exports with the teams who use them and we're confident this now solves the problem.
However, this is a less than ideal solution. We're using caseworkers to verify data that we, as a department, should already have and be able to share with services that need it.
What happens next
Products all across the regional services division rely on contact details in much the same way.
We are working to understand what we can do to provide a shared source of contact details that can maintain up-to-date information, and be used in our casework management systems.
This should remove the burden from caseworkers and delivery officers to add contact details.
Instead, they would be automatically imported to a project from another source.
That source could also be used to provide accurate contact details for the teams who need to send legal paperwork to specific individuals.