Allowing multiple accounts for schools
When building new services to facilitate the delivery of the early career teaching reforms, we decided to allow multiple user accounts for schools, as opposed to one.
In ECF1, only one account can be created per school. This is because of a misunderstanding of the policy behind the early career framework. Originally, it was thought there was only allowed to be one school induction tutor per school. So, they thought only one person - the school induction tutor - would need to access the service.
However, in reality a school can have multiple induction tutors, and people other than these induction tutors might need to view and update data for EXTs and mentors.
Allowing multiple user accounts for schools
In our discovery, access to the Manage training for early career teachers service was highlighted as a key problem for school users.
In particular, being restricted to one account per school led to lots of support tickets and delays to getting ECTs and mentors registered.
This is because:
- there may be multiple people involved in the adminstration of early career teachers and mentors
- the person that handles registration might change, and when it does, it can be hard to update once the singular user has left
- the service asks for the school induction tutor to be the only user on the service, but often it is other administrative roles filling in this information
In the new digital service we will allow multiple accounts per school. These will be administered by DfE Sign in, as discussed in the Exploring using DfE Sign in post.
No longer assuming who the school induction tutor is
In the current service, only one user is allowed to sign in. It’s asked that this user is the school induction tutor. However, we know from research and support tickets this is not always the case.
In the new service, we are not assuming every user of the service is a school induction tutor. This is because in reality we already know they aren’t.
We can’t directly infer it when we have multiple users. In future, we might consider other ways to gather who the school induction tutor is.
Some lead providers need to understand who the school induction tutor is for training.
We know that all lead providers need to know someone to contact at the school who is adminstrating the registration deals of that mentor or ECT.
Therefore we need to work out how we can surface contact details for one or more of the school users to lead providers via the API.
This could be passing the emails for all school accounts, or just giving them the email of the user who registered that particular ECT or mentor.
Next steps
We’re still a long way off releasing anything. However, we still need to consider the impacts of this decision and how we can still best meet the needs of users in a way that is technichally feasible.
First, we need to consider how we could find out who the school induction tutor is for a school, and if it’s high priority enough to be part of our initial release.
We also need to check how we can make these changes whilst not adversely impacting the API lead providers use. We’ll work with the team that currently works on the API to find out how we can best communicate school contact details to lead providers.