Big shame for big society – behind the scenes of the vschools website

This weekend, reports in the national press mentioned the vschools website being shelved in a “big blow to big society”, so I thought it would be useful to give an insight into what the vschools site is.

The vschools site already exists, has been tested with pupils and schools, and hundreds of schools are ready to sign up. It’s just been sitting on a development server, waiting for a decision for the Department for Education – and sadly, they have decided to scrap the Youth Community Action programme, of which vschools was a part.

Here’s the story so far…

Back in December last year, we were asked to look at how we could build on the success of vinspired.com and the vinspired awards to create a safe, secure and engaging volunteering platform for 14-16 year olds in every maintained school in England.

Luckily we had a solid platform to (literally) build on: vinspired.com, a social platform connecting volunteers aged 16-25 with voluntary organisations who need their help. Building on top of this platform meant:

a) younger volunteers could move their accounts to vinspired at age 16, taking with them a record of their volunteering history

b) voluntary organisations could offer opportunities to the younger audience without doubling up on work

c) making the most of functionality we already had, and importantly

d) we could actually deliver an awesome website in a very short timescale without cancelling Christmas. (Just.)

Creating private spaces for schools & students

Using rapid, Agile development, we extended the vinspired platform, and designed and built private “walled gardens” for schools. This would ensure that pupils could share their photos, comments and achievements with others in their school, without sharing personal details or plans with the wider internet community. Schools could publish their own opportunities, and keep a record of the achievements of pupils at their school in one, easy to use dashboard. Pupils could view opportunities within the school and others in their local communities, offered by approved providers recruited by the vschools advisers.

Schools were also given public web pages, where they could showcase their achievements (without identifying individual pupils) and share best practice.

Awards for all

Next up, we extended the age range for vinspired awards, so that pupils could get recognition for their efforts. To do this, we integrated the awards system into both vinspired and vschools user profiles, making it easy for young people to record the skills they learned and the impact they had on their communities. Both sites benefited from this one piece of work.

Image: Early designs for the vinspired awards integration

The next challenge was to work out how to create accounts for hundreds of thousands of pupils without creating loads of admin for staff. Synchronising with existing databases proved controversial in terms of data ownership. Allowing unchecked registrations provoked security concerns, and worries about how the right pupils would end up in the right walled garden. We eventually settled on a token system – school staff could generate unique codes allowing pupils to sign up within a limited time-frame. Each code linked them to the correct school.

Image: vschools service map

Buy-in from pupils, teachers and local authorities

We had, given the time-scales, planned to conduct user testing on the live site, as we had complete control over who could access each secure area, and a team of vschools advisers with contacts in schools who were keen to get involved. However, we were then required to conduct user testing prior to launching the site, so I visited Salford and Milton Keynes to run user testing sessions with pupils and teachers. The feedback was hugely encouraging, helping us to spot bugs but also confirming that the site could work for young people, and I’m grateful to all those who helped with this process.

Since then, a team of over 90 vschools staff have been showing the test site to schools and local authorities, whilst waiting for the green light to launch the site. Figures to end of June (July’s figures come later this week) show 1278 interested schools, with over 500 ready to sign up. Anecdotal evidence from vschools advisers suggest many schools committed to the project prior to the end of term.

So, for now the vschools site remains left on the shelf, but I am hopeful that we may yet find a like minded sponsor to help us realise the potential and share the vision.