Content designers - Michael Soane, Ivy Halstead-Dawber
Policy - Tony Leavy
Interaction Designer - Laura Power
Funding aims and funding types are two examples of taxonomies in the service. These come from the ‘Funding’ content theme. Funding aims and types both have their own tags that sit under them; available entitlements, getting more funding, funding for school operations, funding for high needs pupils, funding for student improvement etc. Both tags and taxonomies have the potential to be expanded, but at this stage in development we have created a basic level of detail to test tags with users.
The purpose of these tags is to better define the content themes and taxonomies that are selected by the user. Just sSelecting only the funding theme for a task does not give a lot of information, but further selecting an aim and type through the subsequent taxonomies and tags, better defines the insight data we can glean from the overall task.
Considerations for taxonomies and tags
There were 3 main considerations when it came to creating our initial version of the taxonomies and tags we use for tasks, subtasks and services.
These were:
- DfE Connect navigation: we need tags that will allow users to view tasks in meaningful categories or filter tasks by theme or action that they’re looking for
- DfE Connect personalisation: we want to make sure that we tag tasks and subtasks in a way that allows us to personalise DfE Connect to only show the items that are relevant to the school that is logged in, for example we do not want to show a task for primary schools to a high school
- Insights: tags also feed into explore DfE Connect data which allows teams in DfE to view stats and figures to inform their work, such as which months have the largest sized tasks or what type of activities take schools the most time to do
The DfE Connect content team worked out what tags would be useful for users of DfE Connect and many people fed into what kind of tags would be helpful insights for people in the department, including policy colleagues and product strategy experts.
Version one
To meet our needs, the initial list of taxonomies and tags includes:
- Theme, like finance, teaching or HR
- Type of activity, like an application or data return
- School type, like academy or local authority maintained school
- Phase of education, like primary or secondary school
- Size of task, like small, medium or large
- Requirement, such as mandatory or optional
Future work and iterations
In the future, tags will drive data and insights for Explore your DfE Connect data. Tags will support DfE to make data driven decisions to reduce burden on School Business Professionals, such as identifying periods of stress, duplication or similarity of activities and building a holistic picture of the load throughout the year.
This is just the first iteration of tags on Manage your DfE Connect Data. We expect they will grow and change as we learn more about the needs of DfE Connect users and find out more about what insights and statistics are helpful within DfE.