Universities as an area

tell us about their placement schools
use Google Maps to draw the area covered by those placement schools
try a new version of Find where a university is treated as an area with a radius of 5 miles, centred around their campus location (rather than a single point – effectively making each university 5 miles closer and boosting them in search results)
enter details about the number of placement schools and their average and maximum distances

User research

We researched with:

University	Placement schools
Bishop Grosseteste University	400+
Oxford Brookes University	500
Oxford University	39
Reading University	300 to 350
St. Mary’s University, Twickenham	700
University of Bedfordshire	350 to 450
University of Sheffield	Did not know
University of Winchester	Did not know

When asked about placement schools:

In general, a university’s placement policy will consider individuals’ needs like child care arrangement, disabilities, reasonable adjustments, subject focus, student confidence, urban vs rural preference when placing a candidate to a placement school
Universities work with hundreds of placement schools (except Oxford University which works with 39 placement schools) which change, to some small degree, every year
Some universities talked about placement schools placed in local authorities, counties and regions (South East region, for example) rather than 5/10/15 miles
There were fears that we would show placement schools to candidates, or that we would not convey that candidates cannot choose their placement schools
Oxford University have a policy of residency - all candidates have to live within 25 miles from Carfax
Some universities talk to candidates about travel or commute time, rather than distance. “Candidates need to be able to travel for 45 minutes”, “We do not talk about it by distance, we talk about it by travel time”

When drawing an area on a map:

Drawing a polygon would be a struggle for some users
Some users will include outlying schools (eg distant areas with a single school), others will not

When comparing search results:

All participants welcomed the idea of considering universities as a geographical area rather than a single address
Our assumption that the majority of placement schools are within 5 miles of the main campus is not true, especially for rural universities, “a 5 miles (zone) is nowhere near enough for a university. How did you come up with that assumption? It’s ridiculous!”
Participants largely did not see the information about placement schools in search results

When capturing information about placement schools:

It would be difficult (‘an internal exercise’) to give the number of placement schools in bands of 5/10/15 miles
Participants misinterpreted “within 5 miles” as being from the candidate rather than the campus
Range and average worked best for the majority of universities, average commute might work too
Participants correctly guessed that these fields might be in "About your organisation “Locations” was a frequent second guess