Form a MAT

Introduction

This route for schools to convert to academies differs from single school conversions as it also involves the formation of a new trust in parallel with the schools converting to become academies. As such we needed to think a bit differently about the designs, as they needed to reflect that.

New project list

In short, the new trust was became the project, rather than the single school. And the schools making up the new trust were all part of that. For this reason, it felt we needed to create a new project list as a starting point, which listed the new trusts rather than combine it with the single school conversions.

Main differences between single conversions and Form a MAT

Following on from this was a key requirement to display the list of schools prominently within each trust or project. Along with a need to view each school's imformation on the same screen to make it easier for delivery officers to comapre and contrast the information for each school. So we used tabs to display the list of schools, along with separate tabs for the school and trust information. This essentially meant using a task list to keep track of the progress for multiple schools. So the tags were changed to reflect this, eg 0/3 COMPLETE etc.

These were the main changes for the Form a MAT designs. Additionally we created tabs for the Performance data and Create project document. As multiple schools were involved, there seemed no single obvious place to put the Create project document link. So by creating a tab for it, it is always discoverable to users.

Next steps

Further research is needed with this. In particular the following:

• these designs do not yet include the 'Record a decision' or 'Project notes'. It may be that these are not required though.
• the Budget page may need iteration to incorporate some schools needing budgets by academic year, rather than financial year.
• the 'Key people' section in the trust details needs further researhc to establish what the common key roles actually are.

Future discovery and research will help inform these.