Showing schools with relevant education phases when attaching schools

Context

When researching with providers, we found challenges with the list of schools when attaching schools to courses.

Pain points

Currently, when attaching schools to courses providers see the full list of schools on their account, regardless of education phase.

For example, primary schools are in the list of schools to attach to a secondary Biology course.

User need

Providers need to see schools of the relevant education phase when attaching schools to courses. For example, they only want to see primary schools when on a primary course.

What we did

We attempted to solve for this by using the data from Get Information About Schools (GIAS), which has ‘education phase’ in the data.

List of education phases in the GIAS data

• Nursery
• Primary
• Middle deemed primary
• Secondary
• Middle deemed secondary
• All through
• 16 plus
• Not applicable

However, we found a large number of schools had the education phase ‘Not applicable’, which made it challenging to know which courses they should be made visible on.

We conducted analysis to work out if we could segment the ‘Not applicable' schools using the minimum and maximum legal age range data that is also in GIAS.

From this analysis, we came up with the following logic to segment ‘Not applicable' schools using age range:

Logic for ‘Not applicable’ schools

• Primary: lower age <= 8
• Secondary: lower age 9-14 OR (lower age <= 9 AND higher age >= 15)
• Further education: lower age >= 15
• No age range: show in all

Multiple of these conditions can be true.

We thought this would work and we planned to implement this logic in time for rollover 2026.

However, when we started to build the solution, we found implementing this logic would result in several providers having no schools in the list when trying to attach schools to courses.

This was not due to a flaw in the logic, but because some providers who only offer primary courses appear to only have secondary schools in their account and vice versa.

As there was not enough time to do further research with providers, we had to abandon implementation of this work for rollover 2026.

Next steps

We did previously test displaying filters of the GIAS education phases when improving attaching schools to courses, to allow providers to narrow down the list of schools.

They expected not to see irrelevant education phases, rather than having to filter them out, which is why we pursued the idea above of automatically segmenting schools.

We would like to revisit designing and testing filters to see if that will help solve the user need.