TechnoPhobia

Becta

We have worked with Becta for a number of years on a variety of projects. Our most recent is the Self Review Framework, which is used heavily by most UK schools…

The Background

Becta, the government agency leading the national drive to ensure the effective and innovative use of technology throughout learning, has a remit given by the Department for children, schools and families (DCSF) to lead the co-ordination, development and delivery of the government’s strategy to harness the power of technology to help improve education, skills and children’s services. Becta offers a self-review framework to assist schools in assessing and improving their school’s use of ICT. Based on maturity models, the framework allows benchmarking against established best practice and helps to create an action plan for improvement.

The Challenge

When Becta approached TechnoPhobia it already had an online self-review tool however many aspects of its usability were sub-optimal. Becta’s goal was clear ‘to offer our users a vastly improved online experience’.

The Response

TechnoPhobia designed and built a new highly-tailored online tool that provides a self-review in the form of an interactive structured questionnaire covering each strand of the framework. Divided into relevant questions it is supported by an explanatory guide for each point covered by the review. The intuitive system allows the user to indicate, by means of a scale, how the school is performing in each particular area and record evidence, comments and action planned. The framework system then uses the data collected to benchmark the school against other schools and the ICT Mark accreditation standards. Based upon these results the system dynamically generates focused and appropriate recommendations and action plans. Version control allows the schools to save each review and generate on and offline reports to monitor and guide progress. The user-centric interface presents a clean and straightforward design that is efficient and concise. This powerful and innovative tool drives out many of the inefficiencies encountered when undertaking a review of this kind by removing much of the time consuming planning, collating, formatting and reporting and allowing users to concentrate time and effort in the important areas of review and implementing improvement.

TechnoPhobia provided Becta with a bespoke Content Management System (CMS) that enables update and expansion of site content, such as the incorporation of new strands or questions into framework review. The CMS also allows for the creation and management of other language versions of the site, the first of which being in Welsh. An intuitive user interface allows Becta to upload data from Edubase, a register of all educational establishments in England and Wales, maintained by the Department for Children Schools and Families. TechnoPhobia has not only designed a CMS, we have created for Becta a framework creation system, a model that can be used to roll out other self-review programmes. TechnoPhobia is also providing Becta secure hosting and data management.

The Result

The new self-review tool empowers schools to drive forward their ICT strategies with greater ease and has been a huge success with take-up by users increasing significantly over the first 6 month. However the far reaching consequence of this powerful new tool mean the real results will be seen in the increasing skill and competence of the next generation of ICT practitioners and users.

On the release of the new self-review tool Simon Harrison, Project Manager – Becta, kindly said ’the new tool adds further real value to the self-review framework. The user-centred design presents a tool that is much more usable than its predecessor and will contribute enormously in supporting schools with their developing ICT strategies. A big thank you to all on your team who have made this project such a pleasure to work on.’

https://selfreview.becta.org.uk/