Design history post first published: 12 June 2024.
For Free Schools Store projects, there are a total of 15 statuses.
We know we need statuses in Manage free school projects (MFSP) to meet these user needs:
As a School Places Analysis (SPA) team member, I need to know the status of a free school project so that I can product accurate reports for stakeholders and ministers.
As a team leader, I need to know the status of a free school project so that I can support project leads in my team with their projects (if needed) and report on specific projects in monthly programme delivery meetings.
As an Education Estates comms teams member, I need to know the status of a free school project so that I can issue accurate comms to the public on upcoming free school openers.
Creating a design
We did some research with our subject matter experts to understand whether all 15 FSS project statuses are needed. From this, we had the confidence to reduce the number of statuses to 10:
- Application competition stage - the special or alternative provision application has been approved, but a trust has not been appointed yet
- Application stage - the trust's application is being considered
- Cancelled - the project was cancelled in the pre-opening stage
- Closed - the school has closed
- Open - the school has opened
- Open free school, not included in figures - for example, the school is not a free school but is using free schools budget
- Pre-opening - the free schools project stage after the application stage
- Pre-opening, not included in figures - for example, this project is not a free school but is using free schools budget
- Rejected - the trust's application was rejected
- Withdrawn in application stage - the trust withdrew their application
- Withdrawn in pre-opening - the trust withdrew their project
We used the tag component and grouped statuses into tag classes:
- govuk-tag--purple for Application competition stage and Application stage
- govuk-tag--orange for Cancelled, Rejected, Withdrawn in application stage and Withdrawn in pre-opening
- govuk-tag--blue for Closed
- govuk-tag--turquoise for Open and Open - not included in figures
- govuk-tag--yellow for Pre-opening and Pre-opening - not included figures. These statuses were based on a similar status called Pre-advisory board in Prepare conversions and transfers
Ideally a project's status would change automatically based on user behaviour. For example, if a user tells us that a school has opened, the project status would change from Pre-opening to Open.
This approach would prevent any status changes that do not reflect real-life scenarios. For example, if a school has closed, we don't think that it will open again.
Due to time constraints in getting ready for public beta, we decided to allow users to change the status manually using a change link and radio buttons. Manually changing a status is consistent with how statuses are updated in FSS.
To do
- ensure the operational SharePoint guidance is clear about who will update project statuses in MFSP
- test the project status design to confirm if it meets user needs
- revisit the project status design in future, to consider the implications of automating status changes