English Hub — DfE Schools Literacy Platform

The Brief

The Department for Education’s English Hubs programme supports schools across England in improving their teaching of reading, particularly phonics and early language development. The programme coordinates a network of hub schools that provide training, resources, and support to partner schools in their region.

The programme needed a platform to manage the operational complexity: tracking which schools were receiving support, what training had been delivered, monitoring progress against targets, and reporting outcomes back to the DfE. The existing process relied on spreadsheets and email — workable at small scale but not sustainable as the programme expanded nationally.

The Approach

We built a multi-tenant web application where each English Hub operates within its own workspace while the DfE has a national overview across all hubs. The data model needed to handle the relationships between hub schools, partner schools, training events, school visits, and outcome measurements — with reporting that could aggregate from individual school level up to national programme metrics.

Government projects come with specific requirements around accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA), data handling, and user experience standards. We designed the interface to be straightforward and functional — school administrators and hub coordinators aren’t technical users, and the system needed to be usable without training.

The Build

The platform manages the full programme lifecycle. Hub coordinators register partner schools, schedule training events and school visits, record observations and recommendations, and track each school’s progress against their improvement plan. Automated reminders keep follow-up visits on schedule.

Training event management handles registration, attendance tracking, resource distribution, and feedback collection. Hub coordinators can see at a glance which schools have attended which sessions and identify gaps in engagement.

The reporting layer gives the DfE programme team national visibility: how many schools are being supported, what activities are being delivered, and where the programme is having the most impact. Reports can be filtered by region, hub, school type, and time period. Data exports feed into the DfE’s broader reporting requirements.

Role-based access ensures hub coordinators see only their own schools, while DfE administrators see the full national picture. The permission model is granular enough to support the programme’s organisational structure without being complex enough to confuse non-technical users.

The Result

The platform replaced the programme’s spreadsheet-based processes with a single source of truth for all programme activity. Hub coordinators spend less time on administration and more time supporting schools. The DfE has real-time visibility into programme delivery nationally. The system has handled the programme’s growth from pilot to national rollout without architectural changes.