Overall satisfaction scores for all products have consistently averaged 4 out of 5
The Department for Education asked dxw to work with them to replace legacy systems and modernise regional services
Between 2021 and 2025, we worked with the Department for Education’s Regional Services Division (RSD) to rebuild their core systems and processes. Streamlining the way England’s schools become part of multi-academy trusts and supporting DfE’s oversight of them.
DfE commissioned dxw to work side-by-side with civil servants to replace outdated legacy systems. Combining our expertise in research, engineering, design, and data analysis inside mixed teams. A central strand of the work was strengthening in-house capability at DfE, so they could sustain delivery independently when we had gone.
Outcome
By early 2025, RSD had rebuilt its core operations. It had a single coherent digital portfolio, reliable data driven services, and was largely self-sufficient.
Over 3 years the partnership delivered:
- 5 new live services: Prepare, Complete, Find Information about Schools and Trusts, Record Concerns and Support for Trusts, Manage Free School Projects, and the Dynamic Form Builder – replacing every legacy system.
- Shared foundations: a common Azure platform, reusable Terraform infrastructure, the RSD Design System and work started on developing Service Patterns.
- A unified data and performance framework: live dashboards linking operational data to delivery priorties.
- Cultural change: an agile, “one-team” model with show-and-tells and embedded research and analytics.
And the results were measurable:
- legacy systems were fully retired with a large-scale exit of critical staff tools
- significant savings on annual licence costs
- system usability scores up from 65 to 87
- data report generation times were cut from ~19 seconds to under 2 seconds
Project drivers and the pre-2022 technology landscape
RSD’s transformation programme was shaped around the Government policy at the time that every school should become part of a strong multi-academy trust. The Department defined a Regional Services Digital Transformation (RSDT) roadmap to:
- replace legacy platforms with accessible, secure, cloud-native services
- establish standardised workflows and data models
- improve data quality and insight for oversight and policy teams
- embed agile delivery and user-centred design as default practice
What we did
Our discovery phase confirmed the need for parallel product streams, each focused on a core function: academy conversion, data insight, concerns casework and free schools.
User-centred research
During discovery, alpha and private beta, user interviews were key (with 40+ caseworker interviews conducted for the replacement of the Knowledge Information Management system alone).
We found common pain points across systems such as entry duplication and inconsistent terminology and identified new considerations, like the need for clearer data provenance. Building data provenance fields into the user interface from the start increased trust with users and reduced the scope for error.
Throughout the project, simplified workflows were prototyped, and incremental improvements released to systems based on user feedback.
Technical approaches
The technical enablement workstream’s goal was to provide a secure, scalable, and maintainable platform that could host multiple services consistently across the Department’s Azure environment. We worked closely with DfE’s central TechOps and Common Architecture teams to ensure alignment with departmental standards.
All the resulting RSD services followed a standardised architecture pattern including Azure App Service hosting with multiple deployment slots to enable zero-downtime releases. Plus a .NET 6 MVC framework with Razor pages, selected for alignment with DfE’s existing technology estate.
Each service used GitHub Actions for continuous integration and delivery, and a shared DevOps template repository helped maintain consistent security policies across repositories. This reduced setup time for new services from several days to under an hour.
dxw engineers also produced “Runbooks”, documenting service setup, deployment, and monitoring and covering incident response, recovery procedures, database backup verification, and pipeline failure diagnostics. These were subsequently reused across part of the DfE digital estate.
RSD Design System and Service Patterns
There was some inconsistency in visual design, interaction patterns, and accessibility standards. By late 2023, there were 5 live or near-live services, each built at different times and with slightly divergent interfaces.
Together with DfE colleagues we developed a standalone repository containing reusable, version-controlled components. In parallel, we have begun work to establish a set of Service Patterns to enable smoother transitions between policy, operational and delivery teams.
Our aim was to create a shared understanding and use of standardised service delivery steps, actions and tasks. This strengthened collaboration by providing a common reference point for what a complete service looks like before any code is written.
What the data says
We worked with DfE’s central performance function to develop a standardised framework that defined what “performance” meant across the RSD portfolio and mapped each service’s metrics to the Department’s wider outcome measures.
After 6 months of operation, it was great to see tangible improvements:
- 90% of dashboards now refreshed automatically (up from 40%)
- mean data quality issues per week reduced by 72%
- system-level metrics (uptime, response time, error rate) were consistently available for all RSD services
Overall satisfaction scores for all products have consistently averaged 4 out of 5 (5 being very satisfied), while ease of use scores are slightly higher, averaging 4.4.