Department for Education: Creating digital and technology standards to be used in schools

The Department for Education (DfE) is responsible for children’s services and education, including early years, schools and higher education. They are also responsible for further education policy, apprenticeships and wider skills in England.

As part of the department’s role, they produce resources to help schools and colleges make good decisions with technology. One of these resources, digital and technology standards, makes sure that schools and colleges understand the minimum requirements for technology in education. By producing these standards, and influencing schools’ and colleges’ use of technology, the DfE aims to support high quality teaching and learning, and to create an inclusive environment.

Nexer Digital has worked with the DfE as a key user research and design partner across more than 100 high-profile projects since 2019. As part of this work, we provided content designers and user researchers to work in a multi-disciplinary team producing 11 digital technology standards covering areas including:

• cyber security
• filtering and monitoring
• broadband
• cloud solutions
• digital accessibility
• digital leadership and governance

The team included people who hadn’t written collaboratively before, so we worked hard to craft a process that was efficient and allowed subject experts, user researchers, policy experts and content designers to work closely together to contribute to the final digital technology standards.

The process we developed was:

1) Scoping workshop

We wanted to avoid a process where subject experts defined the scope and structure and then wrote a draft for content designers to edit. Real collaboration happens when everyone is involved from the start and gets to influence scope and structure, as well as language.

We ran a scoping workshop and gathered information from policy and subject experts into a Lucid board. This allowed everyone to understand the problem and the context. Our content designers could then start to break it down for the user.

2) Pair writing

Pair writing is a collaborative writing technique. Rather than a linear process, where one person writes something for another person to review, subject experts and content designers sit and write together. We used this technique to create a first version of a standard for our user researchers to test. We also involved policy experts who were able to check our work as we went along.

3) User research

We used a combination of two user research methods in parallel on the standards content:

• moderated interviews, where we walked through the content of a set of standards on a video call with a user (taking note of any feedback), we then asked overarching questions about the standards
• unmoderated mark-up testing – for this method, the standards content and follow-up questions were sent to users in a Word document who were then asked to add in-line feedback in the form of comments on the content and return the document to us

Both methods helped us to understand how users worked with the content and let us ask additional questions.

Our user researcher reviewed the users’ feedback with the wider team (subject and policy experts and content designers) and created actions to feed into the next draft of the standard. We repeated this process until we were confident that users understood and could use the standard.

4) Sign off

Once we were happy that the standards were accurate, useful and understandable we needed to:

• get them signed off by the relevant DfE deputy director (the senior civil servant responsible for the standards)
• discuss the publishing process with the DfE Digital Communications team (a team of GOV.UK content designers who create, publish and manage DfE's content on GOV.UK) – often called DigiComms, this team makes sure we’ve followed best practice and checks all content

5) Publishing

This kind of content is published to GOV.UK using Whitehall Publisher, an in-house content management system (CMS) used by over 2,000 civil servants to upload, manage and amend content. Nexer’s content designers on this project were trained in Whitehall Publisher and uploaded the standards.

Because of the unique position of government departments, the impact of standards is wider than most similar initiatives. In particular:

• schools and colleges read the standards and work to put them in place
• third-party organisations adapt products and services to help schools and colleges meet the standards

The 2022-2023 technology in schools survey found that:

• 72% of IT leads were aware of the digital and technology standards
• 16% reported that their school met all current infrastructure standards
• 43% reported that their school did not meet all the current infrastructure standards but has put additional plans in place to meet them

In the wider education market, the standards have set a clear baseline for schools and colleges, and many providers have adapted their products and services to meet them. For example:

• The Association of Network Managers in Education quotes the standards at several points in their guide to multifactor authentication: Multi-Factor Authentication: The Game-Changer for School Cybersecurity and their article on cyber-attacks on schools: Cyber Attacks on Schools – Why They Are Increasing and What We Can Do
• Wavenet (a provider of “‘designed-for-schools’ technology”) advertises services to schools specifically to “help your school or college leverage technology to meet the DfE standards and deliver the best possible learning experience to your students”
• The Key, a widely respected education support organisation initially founded by the DfE in 2007 and used by more than half of English schools, offers a downloadable checklist to help its members to meet the standards
• BT Business Direct markets solutions that explicitly meet the standards and offers “an education digital standards consultation”

You can also read more about our work through thee two design histories we wrote: 

• What makes a standard...a standard?
• Reviewing the format and content of our standards