Report serious misconduct by a teacher

Employers and members of the public can currently report misconduct to the Teaching Regulation Agency using a Word document form. They can either print and post this or send it by email. The current forms are available to download from GOV.UK.

There are different versions for the public and for employers.

We are creating a digital service as an alternative to these forms.

These designs are the first iteration of this service, before any feedback or research rounds.

Starting with employers

The digital service will cover employers and members of the public, but we have started with employers because:

we’d like to test with these users before the end of summer term
more referrals come from employers than members of the public

Who we’ve spoken to

We have not tested these designs with users yet. We are aiming to research with:

schools that have referred before
schools who have never referred

We have had initial conversations with:

Caseworkers — they manage cases and undertake initial assessment of the referrals
Admin support – they input the referrals into the TMS system
Policy team – they give the teacher misconduct unit (TMU) guidance and provide a steer on legislation and regulations
Information, Compliance and Assurance Team (iCAT) – they manage the information on GOV.UK and help with proofreading and editing

What you can do with the existing form

Users can download and complete the form gradually.

They can change or tweak the form. We have heard about users that have added multiple teachers in a single form – writing multiple names or adding extra columns. They can also print the form multiple times for each teacher they are referring.

Users can fill in just the parts they know.

They can refer to attached documents or give documents instead of completing fields.

A digital service is more restrictive, but users will have the same needs.

Completing gradually

We expect users to complete the form over several sessions. They need to gather documents, collect information and write descriptions of allegations.

The service will:

allow users to save and return to their form to complete it
break the form into sections, so users can tackle it in chunks and more easily return to specific parts. This will use the task list pattern.
allow users to review everything at the end

The overall journey will be:

Eligibility and jurisdiction 2; Complete the form in parts
Review the form
Declaration – confirm that the information given is true and can be shared
Submit the form

Making fields optional

On the paper form, if a user doesn’t know something they can leave it blank. In the digital version we need to decide if it’s required, and how to ask for it if it’s not.

We are using a ‘Do you know’ pattern. For example, before asking for a person’s National Insurance number we will ask if they know it first.

Jurisdiction

The service starts with an eligibility and jurisdiction screener.

We ask:

Is this allegation about a teacher (or someone who does unsupervised teaching)?
Were they teaching in England during the allegation?
Is the allegation about serious misconduct?

We give ‘I’m not sure’ options if they do not know how to answer, and we encourage them to continue with their report.

It is ultimately up to TRA to determine jurisdiction. We would prefer to receive false positives rather than discourage reporting. Equally, we do not want someone to go to the effort of reporting something if it is obviously not within jurisdiction.

Walkthrough

Video: walkthrough of first designs

Outstanding design issues

Organisation addresses

We ask for an organisation’s address, we intend to add a design to use UKPRN or DfE numbers to more easily identify organisation details. This might be a number field to begin with, and an autocomplete from GIAS later.

Further information

Users may have more information that comes to light after submitting a report – there is a need to submit further information after submission.

TRA may not have enough information from a report, there is a need to request information and allow the user to submit it.

Reference numbers

Users may wish to contact TRA about the case, should we have a reference number? When referrals are input into TMS a number is generated – but that might not be at time of submission. We would not want multiple reference numbers.

Privacy policy

We need a privacy policy, and must indicate how long data is kept for submitted and unsubmitted reports. For example, submitted reports are kept for 50 years. We may want to highlight key points of the privacy policy before a user begins entering information.

Explicit and indecent images, and other harmful documents

Sometimes a user may be uploading explicit images (might be legal) or indecent images (illegal), or something else that may be considered harmful as evidence.

The service:

needs to give guidance on uploading these sorts of files (and whether they should upload them or not)
consider how to protect users and staff from these files, for example letting users flag their nature
consider how these files are stored, accessed and deleted

Multiple teachers on the same allegation

You cannot currently report multiple people at once, for now we recommend users use the existing forms. Or they would need to enter all details again.

Future designs might incorporate features to add multiple people to a report.

Multiple reports from the same user

Reports are tied to an email address, you are sent a code and you can sign in and continue with a report.

If a user has an incomplete report, but they also want to start a new one, there is no way to do this. With this design they would need to submit their first report before creating a second.

We should allow reports to be completed independently, somehow.

Changes from the original form

There are no additions to the submitted form.

Omissions

We have intentionally left out:

fields asking about a person’s gender – we don’t know if these will need to be added for use in the Police National Computer (PNC)
the person’s nationality
the chronology of an allegation – initial feedback from caseworkers told us that this information usually only repeated other fields
multiple telephone numbers for users, we only ask for one number

We are still evaluating if there are fields we can remove or simplify. For example – do we need 3 different types of telephone number for the person being reported, probably not.