Context
When researching the needs of accredited providers, we found they struggled with quality assuring their training partners’ courses.
Accountability for training partners complying with the ITT criteria lies with the accredited provider.
Pain points
Challenges for accredited providers include:
- they give guidance to their training partners on the ITT criteria, but the training partners can interpret it differently
- they have to check training partners have updated their courses with the correct information, which can be very time consuming
- training partners can be slow to update information, such as changes to the fees, and need to be chased
- schools can add them as an accredited provider without them knowing
- they are unable to remove old training partners from their list
- they have to rely on Publish to know what courses the training partners are running
User need
Accredited providers need an easy way to manage who their training partners are, and monitor their course information, so they can be confident they are complying with the ITT criteria.
What we did
To improve how accredited providers can more easily check training partners course information we:
- improved the course list by moving course information to a separate column and adding start date, age range and if a course was fee-paying
- added a link to the course in Find from the list of courses
- added additional course information to the existing CSV file download
User testing
Providers in user testing responded positively to the link to view the live course.
On the CSV file, we originally tested a design that included the paragraphs of course information, for example the information about where candidates will train. This was because providers in past research indicated this would be helpful.
When we tested this with providers, they found the file to be overwhelming and unusable, even after filtering the information.
So we removed the longform content and just added age range, funding type, start date, course length, and fees.
This iteration tested more positively with providers. However, some participants said repeated information was unhelpful, for example if a provider only offers full time courses and each course had a column with ‘Full time’ on the spreadsheet.
They said they would use this file at the beginning of the recruitment cycle to see which training partners are recruiting candidates for their courses
Next steps
We will be building these changes into the service.
Further research and testing need to be done in the areas of:
- allowing accredited providers to remove training partners from their account
- giving more control to accredited providers to approve or reject a new training partner
- whether accredited providers should be given the ability to update certain course information on training partners courses, such as the fees
- whether accredited providers would benefit from notifications of changes made, and date stamps and timelines to show the history of changes made