Scaling the First OEAS Accredited Online Alternative Provision

The Alternative Provision Challenge

Alternative Provision (AP) schools serve some of the UK's most vulnerable students: young people excluded from mainstream education, facing behavioural challenges, mental health issues, or other barriers to learning. These students require intensive support, careful monitoring, and robust accountability systems that traditional online education platforms simply weren't designed to provide.

Academy21, an online Alternative Provision, faced a critical infrastructure challenge: how do you provide that level of care, tracking, and accountability at scale in a digital environment? The regulatory scrutiny, safeguarding requirements, and data transparency demanded by Alternative Provision made this exponentially more complex than typical online learning platforms.

The stakes were historic. No online Alternative Provision had ever received OFSTED OEAS (Online Education Accreditation Scheme) accreditation from the Department for Education. To achieve this, Academy21 needed systems that could track student attendance with precision, provide schools with real time visibility into student progress, handle complex multi school and multi stakeholder data relationships, present evidence of educational outcomes to regulators, and scale to hundreds of schools and thousands of students, all whilst maintaining the personalised support vulnerable students require.

Building Systems for
Accountability and Scale

As Senior UX/Product Designer at Inspired Education Group (Academy21's parent company), I was responsible for designing the entire B2B portal system from the ground up. This wasn't about creating a typical school management system; it required reimagining how vulnerable students could be supported, monitored, and safeguarded in an online environment whilst meeting the rigorous standards required for OFSTED accreditation.

Strategic approach: The foundation was a carefully designed data architecture that could handle the complexity of Alternative Provision relationships. Unlike traditional school management systems, this needed to account for students enrolled in multiple schools simultaneously, mentors working across different institutions, schools purchasing different lesson packages and subjects, safeguarding officers requiring specific visibility permissions, and local authorities monitoring outcomes across multiple schools. I designed the information hierarchy to ensure each stakeholder saw exactly what they needed (nothing more, nothing less) whilst maintaining data integrity across the entire system.

What I built: The solution spanned interconnected systems for both mentors and students. For mentors, I created comprehensive dashboards providing real time visibility into student attendance, engagement metrics, lesson management across 900+ weekly sessions, and safeguarding alerts for concerning behaviour patterns. For schools, I designed oversight systems showing cohort level performance, attendance trends across student populations, evidence bases for OFSTED inspections, and local authority reporting capabilities.

Critical innovation: proactive notifications: Teachers needed alerts, not just dashboards they had to remember to check. I designed an out of hub notification system that delivered morning briefings before the school day started, afternoon summaries highlighting attendance patterns, student specific alerts for concerning behaviour changes, and weekly rollup reports for safeguarding reviews. This shifted the model from "teachers must check the portal" to "the portal tells teachers what they need to know."

Key capabilities delivered:

Data Simplicity as
User Empathy

In high stakes educational contexts with vulnerable students, unclear data doesn't just create confusion; it can lead to missed safeguarding concerns. Alternative Provision involves multiple stakeholders (school administrators, safeguarding officers, local authority representatives, OFSTED inspectors) each with varying levels of data literacy. Every visualisation needed to answer a specific question: "Is this student engaging?" "Are we meeting our safeguarding obligations?" "What evidence can we show OFSTED?"

I designed visualisation systems that made complex datasets immediately comprehensible: pie charts showing lesson distribution and subject engagement, line graphs tracking individual student progress over time, heat maps revealing attendance patterns across cohorts, and comparison tables benchmarking outcomes against historical data. This wasn't about making things "pretty"; it was about ensuring that when a student was struggling, someone noticed immediately.

Results achieved: