We co-designed ways to improve the Scottish school leavers journey.

CLIENT: SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT, STRATEGY UNIT AND EMPLOYABILITY, SKILLS AND LIFELONG LEARNING DIRECTORATE
PROJECT: RE-DESIGNING THE POST 16 LEARNER JOURNEY
DURATION: 4 MONTHS

Areas of Impact

Government 20%
Frontline 60%
Learners 20%

The Brief

The Scottish Government is committed to becoming a more creative organisation.

The Strategy Unit commissioned Snook to work with The Post-16 Learner Journey project team on their priority to redesign the Post 16 learner journey. The project’s aim was to create a better understanding of this journey from the learner’s perspective. To achieve this Snook worked with The Learner Journey Team to co-design new solutions, products and services which would improve the journey of leaving school in Scotland. The Post-16 reform team are responsible for taking forward the reform of the whole of post-16 education system in Scotland, with the ultimate aim of improving the life chances of young people, supporting economic growth and increasing jobs.

The Results

  • 64 Ideas generated to improve the learner journey
  • 120+ People involved, from learners to policy writers
  • 4 Co-creation events held to design and develop the project
  • 3 Ideas are being taken to the next phase of development
  • 5 Educational institutes visited

The Benefits

The output of this work is a film that showcases the qualitative feedback gathered and a report outlining actions to move the project forward. The benefits of this output are:

  • The report is being used to inspire and influence Ministers to implement the ideas co-designed with learners.
  • The Employability, Skills and Lifelong Learning Directorate are using the report to inspire other education organisations to work together in a new way
  • The Employability, Skills and Lifelong Learning now have a visualisation of the learner journey that was previously invisible.

What They Said

“My team has been working closely with Snook over the last six months or so on a project aimed at improving journeys through learning for those who have left school. The work that Snook have led on gaining a better insight into what learners want has been invaluable, as has their work to engage learners in developing solutions to the problems we have identified. The design approach has brought a new perspective to our thinking on learner journeys which will be instrumental in shaping our future policies in this area.”
Gavin Gray, Head Of Higher Education Directorate – Scottish Government

Now What?

Snook are working closely with the Learner Journey team to design a strategy and action plan to enable a design capability within The Employability, Skills and Lifelong Learning Directorate. This is what we call ’embedding a designer’ – in this context, their role is focused on prototyping and testing ideas with learners and key stakeholders.