Teacher services

Overview

I worked on two projects during my time at DfE. 

The first project was to redesign and improve the overall user experience Teacher self-service portal. Teacher use this service to view/download their qualification certificates, view their teaching status and amend their personal details. 

The second project was to deliver an identity solution (DfE Identity account) that would verify a user’s identity and give secure access to DfE services under a single account.

What was delivered

Project 1 Access your teaching qualification service (formally, Teacher self-service portal)

Before just redesigning the service, we spoke to teachers to better understand their usage of the existing portal. The insights gathered during these sessions helped us to identify the primary user needs and also highlight the limitations of the existing portal. We identified a series of top tasks that the replacement service needed to provide the user.  

I designed the service using the Gov design system. This allowed me to quickly prototype and test concepts using a series of gov components that have been researched, designed, tested and are accessible. Based on the user insights we removed many of the legacy features present in the portal and prioritised the display of the teaching certificates. We added print and download options against each qualification certificate. In addition we provided the functionality to change personal details, such as the name on their certificates. Previously this was only possible to amend by contacting DfE’s teacher support team, an expensive process for DfE to continue to support.

Project 2 – DfE identity account 

The objective of the DfE identity account was to give teachers’ access to multiple DfE services via a single Identity solution. DfE wanted to move away from each service having its own bespoke ID solution, which resulted in teachers having to remember multiple usernames and passwords. The ID solution also needed to be scalable and flexible with some DfE services requiring a higher level of security access than others.  

To verify a teacher’s identity we asked them to provide a series of data points during the registration journey in the attempt to match them against their DfE teaching record. These data points included their name, date of birth, national insurance number and teacher reference number. Once a match was made, a DfE identity account was created and the teacher would be securely forwarded onto a relevant DfE service. This design reduces the possibility of accounts being created or compromised by bad actors and reduces duplicate accounts being created by the same user. Once a user has created DfE identity account they would only be required to enter an email and a one time password to access any DFE service in the future.  

Outputs include

• A DfE identity account prototype – used for testing and development
• Journey maps that detailed the functionality and integration of the DfE account

Video overview