In the first year, over 2,600 claims were submitted and over £3.4 million was paid out to eligible teachers
We worked with the Department for Education (DfE) on 2 services that give additional payments to teachers, with the aim of helping with recruitment and retention in England. This was a significant project lasting over a year with a large team
Additional payments are part of DfE’s strategy for the recruitment and retention of teachers. They wanted to support teachers to join and stay in the profession by specifically targeting those within the first 5 years of their career.
The first service we worked on was for teachers to claim back their student loan repayments and the second was for maths and physics teachers to claim additional payments.
A team of civil servants, dxw, and our partner agency for this project, Paper, worked together to design services that would support these 2 policies.
Outcome
In the first year of the service, teachers had submitted over 2,600 claims across both policies. DfE staff had validated claims and paid out over £3.4 million to eligible teachers.
Similarities between the 2 policies led us to create a single extendable codebase that would meet DfE requirements in an efficient way and support additional policies. We also built a ‘back end’ to enable the checking of claims with different requirements.
A by-product of our work, and part of our desire to leave a positive lasting legacy, was the creation of a pattern library.
What we did
Preventing fraud
We needed to achieve the right balance between making claims easy for teachers and putting in place proportionate checks to prevent fraud.
We worked with DfE policy teams to understand their fraud threat model and the potential impacts. We selected the level of identity verification based on our assessment of fraud prevention needs and chose an internationally recognised standard: Identity Assurance Level 2 (Remote). Delivering it using GOV.UK Verify.
Validation checks were automated by integrating independent data sources like Teachers’ Pension records to check that teachers were employed in eligible schools. We told teachers which data sources we were matching against to ensure transparency.
The results of automated checks were used to triage claims from simpler applications that could be processed quickly, to more complex claims that required manual investigation.
Managing complexity
Both services essentially had to act like payroll software, with DfE being a secondary employer. The Department had to ensure that teachers are paid the right amount and were not worse off due to the additional tax contributions from these payments. It also had to calculate and pay the right amount of tax and contributions.
Some teachers did not have straightforward claims as they had worked in multiple schools, for example, or had additional non-teaching sources of income which would not be eligible for relief.
Pivoting at short notice
External factors meant that one of the services had to go into public beta earlier than we’d planned, so we refocused our efforts to make this possible. Our agile approach allowed us to pivot mid-sprint and focus on allowing teachers to submit claims, and defer work to allow claims to be validated online until later.
By working together as one multidisciplinary team, we were able to build 2 services that will help increase the number of teachers in England and encourage them to stay in the profession.