Background
The Ministry of Education is the lead advisor on the education system in Aotearoa, New Zealand. They develop strategic policy for the education sector and deliver policies, programmes and services. Their work focuses on improving community knowledge and participation in the education system, supporting education providers, setting targets and more.
Opportunity
The Ministry of Education needed a site to bring together information about:
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The Learning Progress Framework (LPF)(external link): The typical pathways students take as they make progress in reading, writing and mathematics.
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The Progress and Consistency Tool (PaCT)(external link): Helps teachers make dependable judgements about student achievement through exemplars.
Solution
The Ministry of Education engaged Catalyst to create a new site to reflect recent changes to the LPF and PaCT to strengthen their use.
Frequent feedback sessions were held with teachers and principals during the development of the new site. This ongoing user research delivered a user-friendly, intuitive site so LPF could be used to its maximum potential.
The new Curriculum Progress Tool site complements PaCT by removing ambiguity for the teachers' marking, supporting and predicting students' educational progression.
Innovation
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Content migration: MoE needed to migrate large amounts of multi-compound content (1,200 illustrations and 3 –4000 documents), with many of these files being PDFs, which are not machine-readable. Catalyst provided the solution by migrating content through a bespoke built API, saving time with automation, saving weeks of work, and preventing loss.
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Quick turnaround: MoE needed the site to be live at the same time as a significant PaCT release was due. Using the latest version of the Silverstripe(external link) content management system (Silverstripe 4) on the Catalyst Cloud CMS Platform, Catalyst built key parts of the new site quickly and efficiently. Because of this, we could receive user feedback on what we built and incorporate changes in time for the February release.
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The success of this initiative was ultimately due to the close working relationship between the parties involved. Communication and good decision-making were critical as the joint team reviewed and incorporated stakeholder feedback during the site construction while keeping a close eye on the delivery date.
