Context
The Secretary of State must decide if a proposed free school is likely to meet the relevant Independent Schools Standards once it opens. This decision is delegated to a DfE project lead and their relevant grade 6.
To enable the decision to be made, Ofsted carries out a pre-registration inspection.
This context and the below user needs are based on a chapter in the Department's SharePoint guidance called Ofsted pre-registration inspection and GIAS.
User needs
As a project lead, I need to record information about the pre-registration Ofsted inspection, so that an accurate record of the free school project can be maintained.
There are several tasks project leads need to record before and after the inspection.
As a Free Schools Policy Team member, I need information about the preferred Ofsted inspection block and contact details at the trust, so that I can schedule a pre-registration inspection visit between Ofsted and the trust.
Project leads need to record information about the inspection block and contact details in the openers spreadsheet. The Policy Team use this information to help schedule the pre-registration visit.
If project leads added this information into our product, the Policy Team would not need to rely on them completing the spreadsheet.
Designing a solution
Project leads are the main user of our product, so our design primarily needs to work for them.
As the title of the relevant SharePoint guidance is front-loaded with 'Ofsted pre-registration inspection', we created a task in our task list called 'Ofsted pre-registration'.
We did not include 'inspection', as we believe this will be implied by users and would make the task name too long.
We considered having the actions that need completing before and after the inspection in separate summary cards. However, we do not separate actions using summary cards in any other task list task, so avoided this approach to create a consistent user experience.
We decide to use h2s and summary lists to separate before and after actions. Each change link in summary list 1 points to one edit page, and the change links in list 2 point to another. This is so when project leads re-visit the task to complete the after actions, they don't have to scroll past the before actions each time.
Sadly we did not have capacity to create the openers spreadsheet within our product. This would be worth exploring in a future design, to save project leads' and the Policy Team's time.
Next steps
Test whether our Ofsted pre-registration task meets project leads' needs.