The Department for Education (DfE) is building an online service for teacher training applications.
Named Apply for Postgraduate Teaching – or Apply for short – it is being built to replace one run by the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) and will be used to assess candidates’ eligibility and suitability for training courses.
It is now in prototype after rounds of research with a Google doc version and usability testing. This was aimed at identifying specific points of pain and satisfaction in the process, and checking that users could complete applications regardless of their personal circumstances.
The department has begun taking candidates through the service, along with rethinking the policy that sits behind the service.
A blogpost by DfT policy designer Sarah Fisher says: “It’s really exciting to see prospective teachers interacting with what we’ve built. This is helping us understand the process more before we commit to building complicated things that are hard to change.”
A pilot is scheduled to being with a few training providers during the autumn, and Apply will be run alongside the existing service for the first few teacher recruitment rounds. This will feed into a series of improvement of the application.
Image by Glen Besoe, CC BY 2.0
