For the past few months, we’ve had a major project underway that’s taken a huge amount of our resources. We’ve totally redesigned and rebuilt the National Curriculum website and it finally went live on Monday. The Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority (QCDA) set the curriculum in schools. Part of the brief was to include a whole new primary curriculum section, to help prepare teachers, before it comes into force next year. 
This new content had to sit alongside the current primary curriculum as well as the secondary curriculum – and boy, it’s a whole lot more information. But luckily the QCDA saw it as an opportunity to really improve the usability of the site as teachers were previously struggling to find relevant content. They wanted to improve the UX, to consolidate huge amounts of content and also create a powerful new and streamlined website.
So we went through some rigorous research with teachers and education professionals and found out that they wanted to access articles easily but more so, they wanted the site to include a lot more interactive functionality, namely by adding a few planning tools like the ‘curriculum design tool’.
We also added an interactive ‘take the curriculum tour’ Flash video to visually show how the new primary curriculum will be changing and how to find content on the new site.
The new site allows teachers to work more efficiently and in a much more collaborative way.
So, after several months hard toil, the team can give themselves a pat on the back…oh hang on, Nairn says this is only the first phase..
http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/
This new content had to sit alongside the current primary curriculum as well as the secondary curriculum – and boy, it’s a whole lot more information. But luckily the QCDA saw it as an opportunity to really improve the usability of the site as teachers were previously struggling to find relevant content. They wanted to improve the UX, to consolidate huge amounts of content and also create a powerful new and streamlined website.
So we went through some rigorous research with teachers and education professionals and found out that they wanted to access articles easily but more so, they wanted the site to include a lot more interactive functionality, namely by adding a few planning tools like the ‘curriculum design tool’.
We also added an interactive ‘take the curriculum tour’ Flash video to visually show how the new primary curriculum will be changing and how to find content on the new site.
The new site allows teachers to work more efficiently and in a much more collaborative way.
So, after several months hard toil, the team can give themselves a pat on the back…oh hang on, Nairn says this is only the first phase..
http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/
