Posted by: Courtney
Brightwell, head of insight and service design
In DfE, we help schools get good value for money when they buy
the goods and services they need. This could be anything that
helps them operate day to day – from whiteboards to cleaning
services. Even supply teachers!
Staff absence has been a challenge for schools since March 2020.
Staff across the country caught covid and were unable to go into
work. Schools were becoming increasingly reliant on supply
teachers and the agencies providing them.
We recommend a way of buying using an approved procurement
framework but we know that many schools find using frameworks a
confusing process. So we arranged a design sprint to explore how
we can help schools get better value for the money they spend on
supply teaching.
What our early research told us
A while ago we did some user research – a mix of interviews and
surveys. This was to better understand what schools need from the
process of getting supply teachers.
We interviewed 23 people in 18 schools across the country, and 6
people in different supply-teacher agencies. And we surveyed 130
people in schools.
The research told us that we should not underestimate the size of
the challenge to get school staff to stop using one process and
switch to another.
As users, the biggest motivator for them to change what they do,
is if it saves them time.
We consulted with the DfE’s Behavioural insight unit who
validated our research so we felt comfortable sharing it with
everyone who took part in our design sprint.
Our design sprint soon drew attention
Ben Fraser explains design
sprints best in his Department for Work and Pensions blog
post, ‘A Design Sprint is a 5-day co-designed workshop, aimed
at rapidly generating solutions to a business problem’.
During the heatwave, our policy and commercial professionals
spent a week with our research and design experts in a room in
Manchester. They spent hours prototyping a better way to meet
schools’ supply teacher needs.
We sketched out solutions, critiqued each other’s ideas and built
a storyboard to show the user journey.
Our Permanent Secretary, Susan
Acland-Hood, even got involved. Susan was doing a floor walk
in the Manchester office, so we invited her down to the sprint
room. We spent some time talking her through our different design
artefacts posted on the walls.
She liked the idea of getting teams together to work in an agile
way, as well as our storyboard. The board shows the journey of a
user encountering a problem and then using our service to remedy
it.
Designing a prototype to meet schools’ needs
When a school needs a supply teacher, they usually look for an
agency first. They enter into a commercial agreement and then
when the need arises, they request a supply teacher.
This process does the job, but it doesn’t meet the schools’
needs. They have a list of things they’d like to know before
bringing the teacher in. So rather than look for an agency, our
prototype would let schools look at all supply teachers
available, and then make an informed decision themselves.
It would show supply teachers’:
- availability
- day rates
- experience
- specialism
- year groups they have taught
Feedback from users in schools
We built the prototype of the ‘Find a Supply Teacher’ service and
tested it with 4 school business managers who gave us this
feedback.
“I’d love something like this… not making telephone calls waiting
for people to get back, as get instant booking.”
School business manager, maintained primary
“I like the instant confirmation from supply instead of waiting
for a call from the agency.”School business manager, primary
multi-academy trust
Next steps
By the end of the week, not only had we designed a prototype that
could help save schools time and money, but we had also bridged
the language gap between the different groups of professionals
who took part. We'll publish a short post about how we did this
very soon.
Looking ahead, we hope to use a service design approach to
explore the supply teachers market in more depth with our policy
colleagues. We'll let you know how that goes.
Comment below if you want to try a design sprint and need advice.
Or if you have any tips for us to try.
You can check out The Design Sprint for
some great resources to help plan your sprint.
Also, we’d love to know if you’ve done a similar design sprint
and how it went.
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Courtney and DfE Digital and
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