What was the challenge?
The Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) is an independent, not-for-profit registered charity with a membership of over 5,600 schools and organisations. The charity undertakes initiatives worldwide but is primarily dedicated to raising levels of achievement in secondary education in England.
SSAT wanted to offer its audiences a single location where they could find all the relevant information and course materials they required, thus removing the need to visit multiple sites and remember several usernames and passwords for different programmes.
SSAT selected Content and Code to deliver a programme of work between March and October 2009, with additional opportunities identified during the process developed thereafter.
What was our solution?
As the engagement progressed, it quickly became clear that SSAT needed additional development work to meet their objectives. Content and Code advised SSAT on how to go about rolling out this additional programme.
We carried out an Infrastructure Optimisation for SSAT and subsequently developed the following solutions, all delivered in SharePoint:
Company website
Content and Code built a fully customised and branded website for anonymous and affiliated users, produced to XHTML 1.1 standards for high accessibility.
We migrated SSAT’s original site onto a fully redundant environment to resolve some performance issues and implemented a technical refresh of the site to bring it in line with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and best practice.
Corporate Intranet
This is a customised publishing site for SSAT employees, designed to encourage more networking and collaboration amongst staff as well as to improve document management, ultimately improving the user experience for on-site and remote workers and minimising effort duplication.
Leadership and Innovation Academy Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)
The VLE is a user-friendly tool that enables users to collaborate and communicate with a network of peers and obtain support at any time.
The solution was created to offer users a single location where they can find all the relevant information and course materials they require, eliminating the need to visit multiple sites and use separate login information for different programmes.
What were the results?
The Content and Code solutions have greatly enhanced SSAT’s online presence and fostered the organisation’s growth.
Traffic to the new website has increased since its launch, with up to 3,000 users navigating through the site each day, providing a solid base from which SSAT can pursue its digital engagement objectives.
The Corporate Intranet is a customised publishing site for SSAT employees that encourages staff networking and collaboration and offers improved document management that improves the user experience while minimising duplication of effort. The intranet unites employees through a common platform and helps to drive a culture of change that mirrors the organisation’s values.
The VLE is a highly engaging solution with a number of interactive features such as discussion forums, video and podcast, wikis for disseminating knowledge. The tool provides many benefits to administrative users, such as advice and support and online forms for peer-to-peer reviews,
What did SSAT have to say?
“We had a fantastic time working with the Content and Code team and are certainly glad that we chose them. The consultants that worked on our project were extremely talented and came to me with ideas that were helpful and aligned to my vision. They understood my objectives and helped me make decisions, which was a real benefit.”
Matthew Gould, Senior Project Administrator, Specialist Schools and Academies Trust