A new digital platform fit for the Teachers of Aotearoa.
Problem
The Teaching Council's existing website and certification portal were disengaging and complex, making it difficult for teachers to complete essential tasks like managing certifications, renewal applications, and accessing high-value services, such as professional learning, sector news, and events. The cumbersome user experience led to frustration, increased support calls, and diverted the Teaching Council's internal resources towards manual task management rather than strategic engagement with teachers.
The objective was to design and implement a new, engaging digital ecosystem - a modern public website and a streamlined teaching portal to significantly improve user experience, improve task completion rates, and elevate access to professional resources.
Solution
We focused on ensuring the new website and portal were intuitive, task-oriented, and met the real needs of the diverse teaching sector.
Key steps included:
- Discovery workshops: we facilitated collaborative workshops with internal and external stakeholders to define the desired features, information architecture, and core user flows for the public website and the portal.
- Design: we collaboratively prototyped new features/pages for the site and portal alongside iterative user testing with teachers across different sectors, e.g., ECE, professional leaders etc., to validate and refine our designs.
- Development: to modernise the Teaching Council’s online presence and deliver a newly ideated teacher portal experience, we implemented a cloud-native digital platform. The platform consists of Builder.io (CMS), Google Vertex (AI Search and generative answers), Cloudinary (asset and media delivery), Vercel (hosting). Access is role based through a secure integration Salesforce, and authentication is federated via Salesforce SSO and the MoE Education Sector Login. Operational reliability and insight are delivered through Sentry, Datadog, and Tealium for analytics and tag management across the production environment.
- The teacher portal is a composed experience populated based on the user, their role, and core-system from Salesforce and derived data from Tealium CDP. Content is displayed within dynamic tiles that appear in the teachers’ personalised portal experience - from learning content, certification expiry, endorsements and approvals due, etc.
Results
The site launched in November 2025 after a 4-month project with no delays or change requests. Key achievements include:
- A significantly improved user experience: single sign on and easy access to mandatory administrative tasks and high-value resources - an improved ‘engagement’ score of 8.2/10 for our new site vs. 5.4/10 for the old one.
- With AI powered search, time poor teachers can find the information they need almost instantly.
- A new digital wallet to promote the unique discounts and benefits available to the teaching community.
- Operational efficiency gains - the streamlined task flows are anticipated to reduce inbound support calls and manual processing efforts for Council staff, enabling them to focus on core strategic functions rather than administration.
- We were honoured to receive a Digital Innovation Award from The Teaching Council for positively impacting the teaching profession.
Technologies
