Background and context
As a pre-cursor to the process of becoming an academy, sponsored conversion projects are encouraged to set up a school improvement plan.
This is where they can get some early support from an existing trust. This can be to help the whole process run as smoothly as possible and provide the school with some support as early as possible.
School improvement plans are related to, but not part of, the process of becoming an academy.
As such we had to consider where we could best incorporate their details within the Prepare service.
One option was to include them as part of the main task list, but we ruled this out as they are distinct enough in their own right.
We decided that the best place to record and surface their details was in an additional tab on the project page, alongside Project details, School application form and other useful resources.
Other considerations
We did have to take into consideration how much space the tabs were taking, so took the decision to shorten the ‘Record a decision’ label to just ‘Decision’.
As well as freeing up some valuable horizontal space, it made sense as users can both record and view the decision there.
The user journey
When a user clicks on the tab and no improvement plans have been added, they will see a message to that effect, and a primary button they can click on to add details of a new school improvement plan.
From there, they are presented with a series of questions asking for details including:
- who arranged the plan
- who is providing the plan
- the start date of the plan
- the expected end date of the plan
- the confidence level of the plan
- any general notes
At the end of the journey, users are presented with their answers using the check answers component, and the option to change any of their answers.
When the user is happy with the responses, they just click on the green 'Add school improvement plan' button, and it will be added under the 'School improvement plans' tab.
Multiple school improvement plans
Schools can have multiple plans.
If required, its just a case of clicking on the "Add school improvement plan" button to repeat the process.
Next steps
We will review the designs and make any changes that may be required following any future user research of feedback from the live service.
School improvement plans will likely be iterated further as part of the new Regional Improvement Teams work that the division is about to start.