As part of our work to change the applications process for the 2023 to 2024 recruitment cycle, we had to review all the email notifications we send from Manage teacher training applications (Manage).
Some of the changes to our emails were released over time in August and September 2023.
The issue
Our team worked with our policy colleagues to change some of the rules when candidates apply for teacher training. These changes included:
- applications will not be automatically rejected after 40 working days
- offers will not be automatically declined after 10 working days
Most of these changes affected candidates when they use Apply for teacher training (Apply). We did some work to edit the candidate notification emails.
Some of the changes would also affect the emails we send to training providers from Manage.
What we did
We mapped out all our emails by taking screenshots and placing them on an online whiteboard tool (Lucidboard). We grouped them by type and added notes of what would need to be changed.
We categorised each group by emails that could be:
- removed
- disabled (we did not want to remove these emails in case we needed to reinstate them)
- edited
Out of 28 provider emails, we were able to remove or disable 5 emails we did not need any more that described the rules we had gotten rid of.
Further considerations
We identified some areas where we could implement new emails for providers.
A previous team had designed an email for providers that would give them a weekly summary of all their applications. This would help providers identify which applications had been:
- updated by candidates
- submitted over 30 working days ago and need a decision