South East Training Schools

Training Schools are high-performing schools that have been recognised by the Department for Children Schools and Families as providing exceptional school-based professional development for all their staff. They provide innovative training for support staff and teachers, work closely with providers of Initial Teacher Education and lead the way on training and development for their local authorities and local schools.

The aim was to provide an online resource to enable schools to celebrate and share good practice, via presenting snapshots of interesting work or best practice.

The South East Training Schools website was commissioned through the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) and Dorothy Stringer School through Julia Brown Designs who took the project lead.

The challenge was to produce a site that encouraged participation and provided an easy to use interface for both viewing and submitting information.

The solution was to build a site that would enable users to become part of a community utilising social networking techniques to naturally build links among the members who would then exchange information among themselves via the site.

The member contributed information was broken down into four distinct 'building blocks', snapshots of work, news, events and discussions. The navigation structure was built to reflect the routes users would take to find this information, focussing on the four main routes that were identified; school, subject matter, information type and search. All information posted would be accessible via all of these routes.

Design and HTML templates were produced by Julia Brown. The content structure and logic was then built using the SqooDriver content management API, and the HTML was incorporated into the system.

Features include:

• Multiple routes to information
• School homepages
• News and events
• Discussion board
• Automated email updates
• Free text search
• Drill down regional map
• Different member groups
• Moderation facilities
• Content editor for administrators

The site is currently in beta release, members are being signed up and content is being added.