Horizon (2012) - Product Manager
Product: ScholarPack
The Customer: UK Schools
The Users: Teachers, Students and Administrators
The Challenge
Throughout the UK education sector post 2008 financial crisis, schools were asked to do more with reduced funding. Budgets were cut, teachers provided with less support and students given fewer subject choices.
In response, schools began to collaborate more closely; sharing administration and classes to continue to deliver the education their students deserved. What began as a series of shared spreadsheets was seen as an opportunity by our ex-Teacher leadership to create something better: a faster and more secure, shareable platform.
The Approach
I started by spending a semester on-site at local schools, observing administrators managing paperwork the communication between schools, and seeing first-hand how teachers ran lessons with students attending from multiple schools.
The insight and credibility I gained from my time in the classroom was hence leveraged to conduct interviews with school governors and parents, to capture the legal, governance and child safety perspectives.
Lastly, the findings on the current student, teacher and administrator journeys were presented back to school leadership for consideration, out of which we gained our initial set of prioritised problems to solve and opportunities to explore.
Key Insights
- Schools have legal responsibility for student safety during school hours and the top priority is knowing where every student should be and currently is throughout the school day.
- Don’t trust pupils to self-certify attendance or location. A young person is liable to forget, lose their phone or in some cases, refuse to comply.
- Avoid adding to a teacher’s workload but aim to integrate new tasks within existing workflows.
- Keep processes simple and familiar for administrators; design them to complement existing toolsets building confidence among users.
The Outcome
A product that removed the need for manual administration of students between schools, enabling students access to classes across the local area and the breadth, depth and quality of education they deserve.
Subsequently the product pivoted to serving primary schools (Ages 5-11) specifically as their sole management system and is now the fastest growing product in the segment in the UK!
