We recently released the Register early career teachers service after over two years of hard work redesigning, remodelling and replacing its predecessor. The old service funded training for over 200,000 early career teachers and mentors. It was built in six …
DfE internal research working group The internal research working group In 2025, a group of Department for Education user researchers formed a working group to find better ways to approach internal user research. The group is made up of user …
The Customer Experience and Design (CX&D) team have created a new pattern called 'Get to an answer'. It makes it easy for user-centred design teams in the Department for Education (DfE) to build content that guides users to relevant information by answering a short series of questions. Where this started The project started with Support for care leavers. What support a care leaver is entitled to …
As a Fast Streamer, I spent six months at the Department for Education (DfE) working as a user researcher on our internal digital platform for reporting IT issues. The research, commissioned by leadership, aimed to understand how users experience the …
Informed consent is a process where an individual makes a choice whether to take part in research. They make this choice after a user researcher gives them information about what the research is about. Informed consent involves both communicating what …
A research crit is a place for researchers to come together and provide each other advice and feedback on their work. The benefits of a crit are they: How they started In the Children & Families Digital portfolio at DfE, …
User researchers (URs) conduct research to understand the needs of people that we are designing services for. URs have several routes to recruit participants. You can explore these further by reading these blog posts about recruitment strategies and managing biases …
The social work induction programme (SWIP) is a two-year programme requiring newly qualified social workers to demonstrate their skills and knowledge with evidence from their practice. At the end of the programme, social workers are assessed against the new post …
In late 2023, the Department for Education (DfE) DesignOps team noticed a recurring problem across the services DfE provided to users. Many of our digital services did not have accessibility statements, or had out-of-date, or incorrect statements. This issue made …
On a crisp spring morning, user researcher Sree and interaction designer Claire travelled to Sheffield to visit the Department for Education’s Accessibility Lab. Their goal was to understand how digital services function for those who navigate the world differently. Inside …
Recent Comments