About
This work looks at updating the energy for school’s journey so that multi academy trusts can repeat the digital journey multiple times or switch to the manual offline process.
Current state
The energy for school’s digital journey is accessible to single schools such as individual local authority maintained schools or single academy trusts. Multi-academy trusts are routed to a register your interest form on GOV.UK Forms. Once completed, the customer experience centre (part of procurement operations at DfE), contact the school buying professional at the multi academy trust before the current contract expires to manually onboard schools to the new energy contract.
Although it is not advertised, multi-academy trusts can onboard some of their schools to this deal. When they get to the schools picker they can select from the schools they have explicitly been authorised via DfE Sign-in to manage.
Issues with the current stare
As we are reliant on DfE Sign-in to tell the service which schools the current user has authorisation to manage. it is possible for a multi-academy trust user only be able to choose from a subset of the total schools in the trust. For example, a trust may have 50 schools but the user may only have DfE Sign-in authorisation to mange 25 of those schools.
Whilst it is possible to amend permissions in DfE Sign-in the process can be arduous as each school must be requested individually and can only be authorised by a user with existing permissions for that school. This is an barrier to onboarding schools to the energy contract and something we look to resolve.
Manual onboarding process
Broadly speaking, an appropriate period of time before the schools energy contracts are due to expire, the customer experience centre will reach out to the school buying professional and begin the manual process. At a high level this involves sharing documents to capture the required information for each school such as meter numbers, VAT rate, site contract details and more. This is currently a single spreadsheet document where each row will contain information for an individual school. The document may have one or more rows completed.
This document is then manually shared with the relevant energy suppliers, any back and forth between the parties is managed, including confirmation of information and potentially resolution of objections. VAT and site addition and information may need to be uploaded by the customer experience centre to supplier "portal".
Issues with the manual process
The register your interest form is built on GOV.UK Forms and captures enough information to contract the Trust, ask for an individual and have a broad understanding of how many schools what to onboard and what energy they want to move.
It does not capture:
- The Trust name, currently the UKPRN is searched on Get Information About Schools and the email address examined to work out the Trust
- Details for each school wanting to onboard, moving gas/electricity/both the date per school/ VAT rates, current suppliers, etc, We only capture the rough number of schools that want to onboard so that we can have an idea of the size of the case.
- Information about how the trust or individual schools want to pay (per meter, per school/trust, direct debit, etc)
Anecdotally the sentiment within the Customer Experience Centre appears to be that we should capture more information immediately, however they have enough information to begin the process and contact the relevant person. Also our working hypothesis is that by asking for all this information upfront we will see a decline in completion rates as school buyer may not have the time/details in enter information for all those schools and GOV.UK Forms does not support save and continue.
Our proposed solution
In an ideal world we would like to modify the digital journey to capture common Trust information. Then allow school buyers to add a school at a time, providing that unique information. Finally, they would be able to loop round to add additional school. However, due to budget and a need to deliver value across multiple products/services, we have decided to deliver a very simple solution.
We propose to explain both ways of onboarding to the users so that they can choose what they think will be best for their individual circumstances. Once the form has been completed for a school, we will provide ways to repeat the digital journey again for a new school or to exit out to the manual journey. We will also modify the school picker so that all users can see all schools in their trust.
Modifying the school picker
The school picker gets a list of schools and trusts that a given user is authorised to make changes for. The problem is that many users do not have permission to make changes for all schools in their trust is each school must be manually requested and added.
We propose to amend the multi-academy trust school picker to show a list of trusts a user is authorised to make changes for then uses information from Get Information About Schools (GIAS) to show all the schools in that trust and allow the user to pick one. This will allow them to onboard schools that they do not have DfE Sign in permissions to change, however they do have “real-world" permission to change.
To help mitigate any risk we immediate show an interrupt page requiring them to confirm they have authorisation, then again at the end we require users to tick and confirm they are authorised to make changes.
Multiple paths to transition from Digital to Manual
We do not know how many schools is too many for “the average school buyer” to onboard digitally and this could likely be a variable thing depending upon an individual’s and trusts circumstances. In addition we do not have data on how a trust may transition schools over time e.g. all at once, in batches or one at a time. Consequently, we chose to provide guidance before the journey begins and again when they choose a school.
Before the journey starts we explicitly state a number of schools we think should be used to decide which journey to use. We have no research to indicate this is the correct threshold so we will look out for feedback on this in future user research sessions.
At the MAT school picker screen we also show some supportive text to again speak to the manual journey. This allows us to provide timely guidance. Our hypothesis is that when users see the number of schools they may need to onboard, they will be likely to reconsider which journey to use.
Once the form is completed, we encourage users to onboard another school. This is the final place where we promote the manual journey. Our hypothesis is that having completed the journey for one school, users will be able to better decide which route to use to onboard other schools.
Gaps in the solution
We have not looked at the manual process and considered how and where it is sensible to route to the digital journey. This is mostly because of the effort to effect changes and publish them via GOV.UK forms. If the the digital to manual exits work then we will consider changing the manual process.