Most MATs have centralised functions such as digital technology, finance and school business management. As MATs are held accountable for their schools, they have a set of distinct user needs.
The problem to solve
Research insights from November 2024 showed that MATs want:
- a view of all the schools in their Trust
- a visual indicator of a school's progress through self-assessments
- understanding how the schools are measured against the standards
- to see how they compare to other MATs
In order to release value to MATs as quickly as possible, we decided to prioritise providing MATs view only access to the service. This first iteration would allow MATs to see the answers that each school within their trust has provided during self-assessment, as well as the recommendations that they have received.
Our design process
As a team we:
- received business requirements to implement a quick solution for MATs
- reviewed the research available to understand the needs
- spoke to other teams who had created MAT view access
- explored different designs and content to ensure the service was easy to use and provided the appropriate information
We initially explored 4 design variations:
1. Read-only view of current layout – showed what the page would look like if we removed the links to the self-assessment.
Above: Screenshot of Plan technology for your school homepage. The page includes sections on Digital leadership and governance, Connectivity, and Filtering and monitoring. Each section lists progress in various areas with options to view more details.
2.Table view – used a simplified table telling the user whether the self-assessment has been completed or not. If the self-assessment hasn't been completed, we have the option to completely remove the link to the recommendations, or add a link to a page where we explain that the school needs to complete the self-assessment
Above: Screenshot of Plan technology for your school, table view page. The page includes self-assessment statuses for several topics.
3.Text-only – a simple layout that allows us to a) provide a different view of the content to help users recognise the fact that they are logged in as a MAT user instead of a regular school user, b) give an introduction to each topic which would be otherwise lost given that these users don't see the self-assessment landing page.
Above: Screenshot of Plan technology for your school text only page. The page provides information about self-assessments and recommendations for schools within the trust. There is a list of schools with the number of self-assessments completed out of the total required.
4.Cards – a high-level view of which self-assessments have been completed.
Above: Screenshot of a webpage from Plan technology for your school. The page is divided into three main sections: Digital leadership and governance, Connectivity, and Filtering and monitoring. Each section contains several subtopics with brief descriptions.
Our design implementation
After a design crit with the STS UCD team, we decided to proceed with a modified version of the table view. This design was built and released in April 2025.
We made the following changes:
Select a school page – using links instead of radio buttons to accelerate the selection of a school. It's a more direct journey and reduces the amount of scrolling the user needs to do to reach the continue button when the list of schools is long.
Above: Screenshot of a webpage from Plan technology for your school, select a school page. It shows a list of schools within the trust and their self-assessments and recommendations.
Home page – using the table view because it makes the page easier to navigate and reduces complexity. We chose to use 2 states for each topic, 'Completed' and 'Not started', to reduce complexity in this first iteration and simply reflect whether a school has completed the self-assessment or not. The ‘In progress’ status was removed to reduce cognitive load with users trying to figure out what the state means.
Above: Screenshot of a webpage from Plan technology for your school, showing self-assessment status for various topics under Digital leadership and governance, Connectivity, and Filtering and monitoring.
Recommendations pages – removing the copy in the overview and replacing it with a simpler version including the answers provided during self-assessment, and so making it more appropriate to MAT users.
Above: Screenshot of a webpage from the Plan technology for your school. It includes a section with questions and answers related to digital technology management in the school.
Change school component – removing the school's location to simplify development for MVP.
Next steps
Live data from the service, as well as offering users the opportunity to join our research panel, means we are making the most of opportunities for qualitative and quantitative insight into their behaviour and needs.
The MAT view-only access is a minimum viable product (MVP). While out of MVP scope, we hope to further research and explore:
- giving MATs extended access so that they can, for example, submit or update self-assessments on behalf of schools
- aligning with the improved school-view designs