This post is the second of 2 parts:
- Iterating how schools add school placements
- Iterating what we show to ITT providers when they search for school placements
In this second part of the experiment, we again addressed problem statement 2, problems with mentor availability:
Providers need high-quality mentors for Initial Teacher Training (ITT) trainees.
They need help finding mentors within their networks, limiting how many trainees they can recruit.
How might we support providers to find enough mentors to maximise trainee capacity?
This is the second iteration in our approach to ‘Finding a school placement’.
Experiment goals
The experiment had 2 goals:
- general fact-finding about school placements
- understanding how a provider might find a school placement
General fact-finding about school placements
The fact-finding part of the research included:
- a general discussion about the participant’s role, their organisation and their partner school network
- a run-through of their pain points, core needs and any specific challenges they face with school placements
Understanding how a provider might find a school placement
We showed participants a prototype journey of how they could search for a placement based on chosen criteria.
How the prototype works
From the first iteration we:
- removed information about class size and training pattern
- added information about key stage, mentor name and mentor availability
We made these changes because:
- showing the class size and training pattern is not helpful to ITT providers
- showing mentor details helps ITT providers make a judgement on whether the school placement is suitable for their trainee
Finding a school placement
Finding a school placement has 5 steps:
- Find school placements by location or by school
- Select an age group
- Select a subject
- View a list of school placements
- View an individual school placement
Find school placements by location or by school
We display the list of locations in an autocomplete. We populate the list of places using the Google Places API.
We display the list of schools in an autocomplete. We populate the list of schools from Get information about schools (GIAS) data.
Age group
The question has 3 options:
- primary
- secondary
- further education
If the user has not answered the question, we show an error message:
Select an age group
Subject
We show a list of subjects depending on the age group previously selected.
Primary subject specialism
We show a list of primary subject specialisms if a user selects the ‘primary’ age group. These include:
- Primary
- Primary with English
- Primary with geography and history
- Primary with mathematics
- Primary with modern languages
- Primary with physical education
- Primary with science
Secondary subject
We show a list of secondary subjects if a user selects the ‘secondary’ age group. These include:
- Ancient Greek
- Ancient Hebrew
- Art and design
- Biology
- Business studies
- Chemistry
- Citizenship
- Classics
- Communication and media studies
- Computing
- Dance
- Design and technology
- Drama
- Economics
- English
- English as a second or other language
- French
- Geography
- German
- Health and social care
- History
- Italian
- Japanese
- Latin
- Mandarin
- Mathematics
- Music
- Philosophy
- Physical education
- Physics
- Psychology
- Religious education
- Russian
- Science
- Social sciences
- Spanish
If the user has not answered the question, we show an error message:
Select a subject
List of school placements
Once the user has selected their location, subject level and subject, we show them a list of relevant school placements.
The list page includes:
- filters
- a list of individual placements
- pagination - if the list contains greater than 20 items
The filter panel includes example ‘contrast factors’:
- age group
- key stage
- gender
‘Contrast factors’ allow ITT providers to filter the type of school placement and focus the results on what they need.
The filters in the filter panel correspond to the information displayed in the individual school placement list item.
An individual placement item on the list includes:
- school name
- subject
- age range
- key stage
- school gender
- mentor name
- mentor availability
Iteration of search results page
We changed the search results list item between experiments 1 and 2 to reflect the changes in the content we collect from schools.
We also changed the search results filters between experiments 1 and 2 to reflect the changes in the content we show on the search results list items.
School placement details page
Selecting the school name or subject in the individual school placement list items takes the user to the school placement details page.
The school placement details page includes:
- school name
- subject
- a summary list containing age range, key stage, school gender, mentor name and mentor availability
- contact details
- information about training with disabilities and other needs
Iteration of the school placement details page
We changed the school placement details page between experiments 1 and 2 to reflect the changes in the content we collect from schools.
Further considerations
We considered some changes that we did not implement. These included:
- whether the service is behind a DfE Sign-in screen
- skipping questions if we already know the answer - for example, age group
- removing irrelevant options if we know more details about the provider
DfE Sign-in
We assume the service’s ‘manage school placements’ side will be behind a DfE Sign-in screen. However, this is not necessarily true of a ‘find a school placement’ service.
We must determine whether the ‘find a school placement’ service needs to be behind a DfE Sign-in.
Skipping questions or removing irrelevant options
If the ‘find a school placement’ service is behind a DfE Sign-in, we can gather more information about the ITT provider and skip questions or remove irrelevant question options in the find flow.
For example, if the ITT provider only runs secondary courses, we wouldn’t ask questions about the subject level or age range.
What we found
Seeing potential placement schools in the service is helpful to providers. However, some users stated they would still need to ensure new partner schools met their partnership standards.
Selecting ‘mentor availability’ was challenging as this would depend on which ITT provider they had chosen to work with that academic year. It is not ordinarily pre-defined.
General findings
There has been a successful effort to standardise ITT course curriculum and mentor training amongst a cohort of providers to allow placement school or mentor sharing.
The mentoring profession could benefit from recognition and an official qualification. This finding echoes our previous research and that of other adjacent teams.
Schools already register Early Career Framework (ECF) mentors into a central system. Therefore, registering ITT mentors into a similar service would be helpful.