Cambridgeshire County Council

Outcome of Expression of Interest: Not shortlisted

In a previous discovery project we collaborated with all the Cambridgeshire Teaching Schools to develop a consistent way for Schools to locate appropriate Continuing Professional Development information and as such we added a section to our existing vacancies website to meet this need and all the information is in one single accessible place. We want to re-design the website to be more user friendly thereby saving our customers time.

The current website is www.teachincambs.org.uk

Discovery evidence

This website has been in place for a year and it’s been identified through Schools Headteacher groups that there are additional opportunities to improve the website further in these key areas:

  • searchable data (courses, dates, locations)
  • importation of data
  • calendar functionality
  • set up of email alerts
  • responsive and optimal design

The information on courses is grouped by category and then displayed in simple tables which contain course data which is unsearchable and hyperlinks to each provider’s website to book. Although Schools can self-serve the system, the feedback from administrators indicates that data-loading is very time consuming. By redesigning the website to allow batch loading this will save time and effort. New courses are constantly being developed so a calendar function would allow users to easily see a forward plan. We want email alerts available for users to set up so that they don’t have to continually visit the website for information they want to receive regularly. We have done some initial research and discovered that 47% of our users come through mobile devices, 13% through tablets and the remainder through traditional desktops. Our current website is not responsive to our users’ needs.

Peterborough Teaching Schools and Peterborough Local Authority have expressed an interest for developing a similar website for their Schools. As such there are 2 opportunities here:

1) open up our website for Peterborough’s Continuing Professional Development courses to be displayed

2) our website to be used as a blue print for other local authority areas (we have done research that shows no other website like this exists in our region)

The redesign of the website will investigate which or these 2 options is more viable. We foresee that further iterations of the website will include taking course booking including credit-debit payment and analytical reporting.

  • Digital leadership training (for council leaders, service managers or senior executives)
  • Introduction to user research
  • Introduction to service design
  • Introduction to digital business analysis