The Case for Service Design Competency in Education Senior Leadership (Copy)
How do you know whether the ‘services’ your organisation provides are actually working for the people who use them?
We’re not talking solely about central team processes here, we’re talking about the whole delivery within education; beyond meeting standards, auditing or organisational targets, to whether the newly appointed teacher moving through your induction process feels genuinely set up to succeed. Whether the student navigating a difficult transition feels supported and understood. Whether the family trying to engage with the school feels like the door is actually open for them.
Most senior leaders in education care deeply about these issues. Fewer would say they have a reliable, systematic way of knowing both the causes, and as a result, the answers. And the gap between caring about the experience of the people your organisation serves and understanding that gap on a deep level is exactly where service design competency lives, particularly in an age of automation.
Typically the concept of service designer is relatively new, especially within the education sector, however many of the concepts are regularly adopted by educations within their roles albeit implicitly. It is one of the most practically important capabilities an education organisation can build. And the case for building architects of systems is stronger right now than it has ever been. If we are to evolve the education system, we need leaders who understand how to and why.
What service design actually is, and what it is not
Before making our case, it is worth being clear about what service design means.
Service design is the discipline of understanding how their people experience the systems and processes an organisation provides, and using that understanding to improve them. That is it. It is about making them work better for the people they are designed to serve, and for the organisation delivering them.
Every School and Trust is already running dozens of services, whether they think of them that way or not. Staff induction; curriculum design; continuing professional development; attendance monitoring and intervention; SEND support pathways; student transition programmes; parental engagement and communication; performance management; extra-curricula activities. The list goes on, and every single one of them has a design: a set of decisions about how it works, who does what, and what the person moving through it encounters.
Some of those designs are intentional and considered. Many are the accumulated result of decisions made over years, by different people, in response to different pressures. Service design is the practice of stepping back to ask who this process is for, what do they actually need from it, what their current experience of it, and how it could be better to then do something about those answers.
Why education needs Service Design more than most sectors
Education is one of the most relationship-intensive environments there is. Everything an education organisation does lands on a person (or usually several people), in different ways, with different consequences depending on who they are and what they bring with them. This makes the gap between intent and experience particularly significant because when a service is not working well in education, the consequences show up specifically on individual levels - how a new teacher experiences their first year and whether they are still there at the end of it, how a student who is struggling feels about asking for support, and whether they actually ask, whether a family feels like a partner in their child's education or a problem to be managed.
That being said, the pressure that education organisations are under, the financial, regulatory, reputational all tends to push design decisions in exactly the wrong direction. Under pressure, the instinct is to tighten, to standardise, to build processes that are easier to audit and harder to argue with. Whilst this is understandable, it tends to produce services that work well for the organisation and less well for the people inside them.
The organisations that are retaining their best staff, building real trust with their communities, and making sustainable progress are doing something additional. They are asking what their services feel like from the inside, and they are building the capability to find out and act on the answer.
This is a point of strategy.
The case for building this competency internally
Here is where the argument gets really interesting, and where we think the opportunity for education organisations is most significant.
Most organisations, when they recognise that a service is not working well, bring in external support to fix it, a consultant or a specialist. And sometimes that is exactly what is needed, a fresh take and new insights; but it has a limitation, when the work is done and the external support leaves, the organisation is often no more capable of understanding and improving its services than it was before. It has a better process but not better capability.
The organisations that make the most sustained progress are the ones that build service design competency internally through people who can do this work as a core part of how the organisation operates rather than reactive responses to problems as they arise.
What does that look like? It looks like having people who know how to get underneath a presenting problem rather than reaching straight for a solution. Who know how to involve the people most affected by a service in understanding and improving it and we’re not talking about sending a survey to a hundred people at the end of a project. We’re talking about meaningful, well-designed engagement at the start using data to measure performance but also understand experiences and make the case for change in a way that senior leaders can act on.
And here is the thing about building that capability internally: it compounds. Each project makes the organisation better at the next one. The frameworks become part of how people think. The instinct to ask "what is the experience of the person this is designed for?" becomes embedded in how improvement work is approached. The organisation gets better at understanding itself and better at improving.
What this looks like in practice
An education organisation with genuine service design capability approaches improvement work differently from the outset. When a problem surfaces for example a spike in staff absence, or consistent feedback that a transition programme is not working the first move is to understand what is actually going on for the people inside the problem, not choose a solution.
That might mean spending time with staff or students or families in a structured way to explore their experience more thoroughly and personally. Developing this understanding shapes the design of whatever comes next, which means the solution is far more likely to address the real issue rather than the presenting symptom making it far more likely to take root and means the organisation stops spending resource on fixes that do not fix things and starts building services that work.
Done well, this is a faster process than the alternative because it reduces the number of times the same problem comes back to the agenda, which is one of the most significant drains on leadership time and organisational energy in education.
The Leadership Dimension: What senior leaders need to understand
Service design happens because senior leaders understand its value, create the conditions for it to work, and commission improvement in a way that gives it the space it needs. It requires people not to move too quickly to solutions because the pressure to act is real and the tolerance for uncertainty is low.
This is partly about knowledge and skill in the process of service design, but it is also about culture. The organisations where service design does its best work are the ones where senior leaders have created an environment in which it is safe to say "we do not fully understand this problem yet" and where the pressure to act fast does not consistently override the wisdom of acting well.
A closing thought
The organisations that will be best placed to navigate the pressures ahead are not necessarily the ones with the most resources or the most sophisticated strategies. They are the ones that understand their services from the inside, that have built the capability to know what the experience of their staff, students and families actually is, and to improve it in ways that are systematic, sustained and genuinely human in their approach.
Building that capability is a leadership decision. It requires investment in the right people, the right development opportunity, and the right conditions to put good practice in place. But the return on that investment, in terms of the quality and consistency of what the organisation delivers, is significant.
The Level 6 Service Designer apprenticeship is designed to build exactly this capability - in professionals who are already doing improvement, transformation or operational work in education, and who are ready to do it with a more rigorous, more human-centred, and more strategic set of tools.
If you are a senior leader who wants to explore what that could mean for your organisation, we would love to have the conversation.
P.S - We have a fantastic Level 6 Service Designer Apprenticeship specifically for educators where you can draw down apprenticeship funding! You can find out more from our website.