Who needs to agree to the conversion date
The conversion date needs to be agreed between the following people and organisations:
- school
- trust
- caseworker or delivery officer
- solicitors
- local authority
Why a conversion date needs to be agreed and confirmed
When a school applies to become an academy, they will have a date they'd like to open as an academy in mind. This is usually at the beginning of a new term.
However, it may not be possible to convert the school in time to meet that desired date.
There are many reasons this might be the case. It could be due to legal complexities in the conversion, the local authority being unable to do what they need to do in that timeframe, or something else.
So a date needs to be agreed that all the organisations involved are confident they can work towards.
The most important thing from the Department for Education's (DfE) perspective is that this sets a date for when grants must be given to the school or trust.
If that funding is not sent at the right time, penalties can be issued.
What happens when a conversion is delayed
There are many things that can complicate and delay a conversion.
A confirmed conversion date can change. It is not unusual for complex legal issues about land ownership to cause a conversion to take longer than initially expected.
If that happens, information about the conversion project is updated in several spreadsheets.
These spreadsheets are shared with many user groups, including team in the Academies Operational Practice Units and the Education and Skills Funding Agency's (ESFA) funding teams. They then change their timelines appropriately.
This is a clunky process that could be more efficient. It could even be automated. This would help to reduce errors.
By enabling users to enter conversion date information into the product, we are able to share that information with the other people who need it.
This could mean that funding teams can access that information in the product.
This would remove the need for people to spend time creating, updating, sharing and viewing complicated spreadsheets.
How users enter the confirmed conversion date in the product
Now, users are able to enter the confirmed conversion date as part of the External stakeholder kick-off task.
This is the second task on the task list and is a crucial step in discussing and agreeing dates, deadlines and forming plans for the project with the school, trust, solicitors and solicitors.
Once the caseworker or delivery officer has discussed dates and all stakeholders have agreed to a date, the user can enter it in the task actions rather than in one of many spreadsheets.
The first data users can enter
This marks an important step in the development of the product. We're now able to ask users to enter information to the product, then store and present that back to them or other users at useful points in the process.
This will be the foundation that the developers build up from as we look to enable more complex data and information to be entered into and used by the product.
What we'll do next
We've already identified some improvements we can make to the location of this action within the task.
We expect that the action will make more chronological sense to be places towards the end of the list of actions, rather than earlier on in the process.
This is because the conversations with the school, trust and solicitors about their preferred conversion date takes place separately to the discussion with the local authority about whether they have capacity to do what they need to do in that timeframe.
If the local authority does not think it will be able to do the work in that time, the caseworker or delivery officer will need to inform the school, trust and solicitors to propose and agree a new conversion date.
As the action is at the moment, it assumes that these conversations happen together. In reality, it may take some time to find an agreed date.
We think it might be show a more clear reflection of the task progress if it was split into two actions. One would refer to the discussion with the school, trust and solicitors, one would refer to the date agreed by the local authority and confirmed by all parties.