About the project
The pathways programme was a leadership development programme, run by social work charity Frontline. It provided social work managers and supervisors with social work best practice and leadership skills.
After the programme ended in 2024, Frontline and the Department for Education (DfE) wanted social work leaders to continue to benefit from it online.
The four pathways
Each pathway corresponds with a different leadership level:
Pathway 1: for those who supervise the practice and decision-making of child and family practitioners and develop their skills.
Pathway 2: for managers leading and supervising a team of social workers, including managing practice supervisors.
Pathway 3: for heads of service leading a whole children’s service area with multiple teams of social workers, having both operational and strategic responsibility.
Pathway 4: for those responsible for the whole child and family social work practice system.
We also included an introduction module to explain the 4 capabilities used in each pathway. These capabilities are:
- maintaining curiosity
- providing clarity
- managing complexity
- expanding capacity
How we worked
Frontline set out the 4 pathways in Microsoft Word, using a ‘storyboard’ format.
While a good starting point for discussion, this format was not suitable for online publication. However, it provided a good platform for SfSW content designers to annotate the documents and recommended changes.
We discussed our feedback through weekly catch-up sessions, where we’d cover:
- changes to meet DfE style principles
- how we could present images and callout boxes accessibly
- restructuring suggestions to avoid repetition and to improve clarity
We worked to the DfE style guide, which meant using:
- plain English where possible
- short paragraphs and sentences
- the active voice
- tools like ‘Hemingway app’ to help reduce language complexity
- a consistent lexicon to check and ensure consistency
This was an effective and constructive way to combine Frontline and policy expertise with SfSW experience and recommendations for publishing to DfE standards.
Creating an ‘introductory’ module
After finding content that was identical across all pathways, we knew there was a risk of users experiencing frustration – especially if they were exploring several pathways in one session. We suggested to Frontline that we could:
- host repeated content in an ‘introductory module’ in which:
- set the tone and context
- allowed us to reduce content in the main pathways for each role
- explain technical and figurative language - an obstacle to those with English as a second language
With this in mind, we set out an introductory module, which contained information on:
- how the pathways can help guide social workers’ professional development
- the ‘4 capabilities’ - themes underpinning each pathway, which are:
- maintaining curiosity
- providing clarity
- managing complexity
- expanding capacity
Challenges
Due to technical constraints, we were not able to include a ‘save’ function in the pathways. Instead, we proposed wording to emphasise that users could track their progress in an action plan or in their own notes.
User research
We conducted 3 research rounds with users between Pathway 1 and Pathway 2: practice supervisors and managers.
We focused 2 of these rounds on testing content and 1 round on usability testing by asking participants to complete a set of tasks on a prototype.
We made the following improvements based on the research:
We validated that users:
- trusted DfE content
- felt the content was clear, concise and relevant
- could confidently navigate through the module
We improved by:
- implementing an introductory module based on participants preferring it included rather than without
- informing users that their progress would not be saved, so as to avoid any frustration later on if they left without noting where they had progressed to
- providing time estimates based on sections rather than the whole module so that it felt ‘manageable’ for social workers to complete
- reducing the length of the contents page too make it feel less ‘wordy’ for users
- explaining clearly what the next steps for users were
Interaction
We wanted to make sure that, wherever possible, we used components that already existed on our service or other DfE services.
Our first port of call was to see if any other teams had worked on a training / eLearning service before, and we found that the Early Years Child Development training could be a good model.
Working through it, we:
- identified components and patterns that we could use
- found and got access to the Figma templates
- built a series of key page templates that we thought could be useful for building our project
- presented back to the wider team and discussed feasibility as well as technical constraints
From then on, we:
- designed the first pathways training module to serve as a template for the others
- took advantage of user feedback to improve the flow, signposting and accessibility of content and diagrams
- worked to make sure that the flow was clear and easy to navigate, and helped users understand the importance of the action plan
Decision log
It was important for us to keep a decision log setting out each suggestion and changes made throughout the content production process. The log helped us record evidence of the rationale behind any changes agreed between Frontline, the DfE policy team and SfSW.
Uploading to the content management system (CMS)
The SfSW team shared responsibility for uploading the content into the CMS. We made small revisions during the upload process and shared any significant updates with Frontline.
The SfSW team developers were also a major part of the production process – creating the instructions and components necessary to produce the finished product.
Future planning
We’re going to track feedback on the pathways content and will consider if we need to make any changes to improve users’ experience.