We drafted six recommendations following our discovery and alpha research phases. For the user group we engaged with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) leaders and technical personnel from local authorities and local health leads to identify EHCP data capture variances.
The purpose of the recommendations are to support local authorities, their partners, and software suppliers to implement or improve their digitised EHCP systems.
What we learnt and understood about our research
We gathered a significant amount of qualitative research data across user groups which we themed using sorting activities. From this we wrote insight statements capturing themes from the data.
We took the analysis further by plotting our insight statements against the high-level steps of digitisation:
- Understanding the need to digitise
- Assessing needs and requirements
- Researching and onboarding
- Understanding and assessing options
- Getting ready to digitise
- Procurement
- Implementation
- Continuous improvement
We used different swim lanes and symbols to signify certain types of insight and the user group it referred to.
The resulting visualisation allowed us to identify:
- sources and patterns of our findings
- which steps of digitisation had the most pain points
- which user groups were having the most difficulty within steps of digitisation
The synthesis work brought everything together in one place. We discussed the findings as a team and defined the user needs which would serve as our inspiration for forming ideas and concepts (ideation).
Ideation and narrowing down ideas
We held ideation workshops with user groups (SEND leads, technical personnel and local health leads) to brainstorm ideas of how the Department for Education could help them progress with EHCP digitisation. We used a voting system to identify which ideas the participants thought were best. Discussing selected ideas helped us to understand the rationale behind them.
With these ideas already captured and ready to use, the whole team came together to consider our research as a whole and our identified user needs. We dedicated time to capturing ideas that we thought we might be able to address.
At this stage, the process had gathered many ideas. We discussed each idea individually and plotted them on to a matrix chart based on how:
- effective we think it would be for our users
- much resource it would take us to deliver
In doing so, we could then select which ideas would be best to consider based on impact and resource.
Refinement and feedback
Using the matrix chart, we grouped ideas based on similarity, resulting in different grouped topics. We felt there was benefit in refining the topics to discover if there was an overall theme to tie the topics together. We shared the topics among the team for refinement. The team defined what the potential solution was, which needs it would address and the risks, measures and dependencies associated with it.
Once done, we played back to the team, gathered feedback, and continued refining the solutions in a cyclical way. We continued refining topics and themes until the problems identified had the right solutions.