Case Study: Academy Transformation Trust (ATT)
A group of 22 academies, operating across 10 English Local Authority areas. Learn Fox provided consultancy to help them develop a comprehensive 3–5-year digital learning strategy and to select and procure a new Learning Management System.
Academy Transformation Trust (ATT) was founded in 2011 and is a group of 22 academies, comprising of Primary, Secondary, Post-16 and Further Education establishments, operating across 10 English local authority areas. They are responsible for the education of 13,500 learners and for the careers of almost 2,000 colleagues.
The Trust’s vision is to transform lives and improve education, and they sought our consultancy to help develop a comprehensive 3–5-year digital learning strategy and select and procure a new Learning Management System that would meet the learning needs of all their stakeholders – students, colleagues, and parents. The new LMS would need to be both flexible enough to serve the needs of these very different audiences and be future proofed to evolve to support the Trust’s vison and aims.
Key aims:
To develop a 3–5-year digital learning strategy to provide a clear vision and roadmap for their digital learning transformation.
To select and procure a suitable learning platform which could evolve with the overarching digital learning strategy.
The three main core user groups were across the 22 establishments and comprised of students, staff, and parents and carers, and the platform needed to be versatile enough to cater for the very disparate needs of these different groups. For example, students would need to be able to access different ways to learn about a topic, while teachers needed to be able to assess a piece of work and mark it against a defined set of rubrics.
Parents would need to have visibility over their child’s progress and attainment, and if necessary be able to contact their child’s teacher, while staff might need to review the learning & development progress of a colleague that they lead and directly communicate with them based on this.
Parents and the wider community were also an important stakeholder for ATT. Whilst parents needed to have visibility over their children’s progress and attainment, ATT also wanted to offer outreach education opportunities to educate parents in best practice ways to support their children (e.g., how to teach and support phonics with early years children).
The Trust’s vision was to offer accredited courses and qualifications to external users, so the ability to surface content to external users and facilitate payments was important to future proofing the solution. The system needed to handle purchase orders and generate invoices as a form of payment.
“Great communication resulted in strong working relationships”
“The support, expertise and guidance Laura afforded us was tailored to our unique context and organisational complexities, and centred on aligned values. Laura's work has been fundamental to the success of our LMS selection and the evolution of our Digital Learning Strategy.”
Amy Bills, Regional Education Director - ATT
The process
To understand ATT’s organisational needs, combined with the end-user needs, we undertook comprehensive stakeholder focus group interviews and a large-scale survey attracting 2,000 responses. This enabled us to then create detailed user personas and user stories. These were then mapped to the functional requirements, using the right language and format to facilitate screening the vendors. Mapping the requirements to the user stories also ensured that each diverse and specific user group was well catered for (staff, students and parents / carers), and that value would be delivered to each user group.
A thorough content audit and review was also undertaken to review existing content, as well as a gap analysis against the vision, the provision of a best practice design blueprint, and a review of the most appropriate authoring tools to equip their internal teams. A strategy to start with an MVP (minimum viable product) and then iterate and refine the content product offerings was also explored.
The Digital Learning strategy provided clarity to ATT on a recommended LMS rollout approach, activation strategies, internal processes for LMS ownership, in addition to recommendations on measuring LMS engagement and learning impact metrics, adaptive interventions, and data visualisation.
For the LMS selection, we used our tried and tested end-to-end approach covering needs analysis, vendor screening, to RFP. We created clarity around the pros and cons of each solution category (e.g. open source LMS, off the shelf LMS, and LXP) and gathered a selection of vendors, applying a scoring method based on key differentiating criteria such as human factors, support packages, price, sector experience, and the vendor’s product roadmap (to future proof the solution), to get an agreed shortlist of vendors to invite to RFP.
The full RFP process was then managed, creating all the RFP documentation, an evaluation scorecard, and managing vendor submissions and demos to an evaluation panel representing business interests.
“Laura was the epitome of effective project management.”
"What I liked most was her effective translation of industry jargon; her approachability, warmth and clear professionalism; and her incredible efficiency and the meeting of all deadlines."
Debbie Clinton, CEO - ATT
Outcomes
ATT had a digital learning strategy that ensured they were prepared for the next steps with a clear road map for their LMS roll-out, and were exactly where they needed to be at the end of the project.
“The ability to capture all key stakeholder views… was exemplary.”
"My expectations were exceeded throughout the process and I cannot speak highly enough of the service and support we received… which was invaluable and has greatly assisted ATT in selecting the best system and provider for our pupils and staff."
Edward Thomas, Director of Operations – ATT
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