Removing the sign in feature

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Illustration showing the heading “Support for early career teachers” with a sign in form scribbed out

Previously the Support for early career teachers service required a user to sign in to view the training materials.

We removed the feature and made all of the content viewable without signing in.

This change was made on 1 November 2023.

Previously

The Support for early career teachers service was originally set up so that you needed to sign in to view the training materials.

ECTs and mentors were given accounts when they were registered for training through the Manage training for early career teachers service. They could then sign in, and were only shown materials from the provider that had been selected for them by their school induction tutor.

The Support for early career teachers also allowed anyone to create an account. This was added so that school induction tutors, who might not be mentors, could also access the content. They were able to see content from all 4 providers, in order to be able to assess which one to use for their school.

For both types of users, signing in involved entering their email address and then clicking a ‘magic link’ emailed to them. There was no password.

Screenshot of a page title ‘Support for early career teachers’. The first paragraph says ‘Use this service to access training and support materials for the Early Career Framework (ECF), accredited by the Department for Education’. There is then a green button labelled ‘Start now’. Beneath that is the heading ‘Before you start’ which has the text ‘If you’re not an early career teacher or mentor, you’ll need to create an account to access the materials’. The phrase ‘create an account’ is a link.
The previous start page

New design

The updated service no longer has a sign in feature, and instead all of the content can be accessed publicly.

The first page of the service contains links to the content from all 4 providers.

Screenshot of a page title ‘Support for early career teachers’. The first paragraph says ‘The Department for Education has selected 4 expert teacher training providers who have each developed their own accredited materials based on the early career framework.’ There are then 4 links in a list labelled Ambition Institute, Education Development Trust, Teach First and UCL.
The new start page

Why we made this change

We made this change partly because the previous service was developed on a CMS platform that was very hard to maintain.

Making the content publicly available also avoids the needs for users to sign in and have to wait for an email, which could be frustrating.

We are also interested to see whether the content may be useful for a wider set of users.