The Brief

Outlandish built and launched the School Cuts campaign website in 2017. It’s an award-winning website that raises awareness of the impact of school budget cuts. Since its launch, reductions in school budgets have continued to significantly impact education across the UK. At the same time, the School Cuts campaign has continued to gain momentum.

Although some basic features had been added since the site was launched eight years ago, the campaign website needed to work harder to reach and engage more audiences and continue to fight for more funds for our schools.

The Client

The campaign to Stop School Cuts is run by the National Education Union, the largest education union in Europe. It’s supported by the Association of School and College Leaders, the National Association of Head Teachers, the National Governance Association and campaign group ParentKind.

Our Solution

Phase 1 Theory of Change Workshop

After the 2024 election, Outlandish and the School Cuts campaign team decided to take a step back and run a Theory of Change workshop to set the website’s vision and goal with Labour now in government.

Phase 2 User Research

During the Theory of Change workshop, it was identified that we needed to understand the needs of those who most used the site.

“The research that was conducted was really interesting in helping us understand how users engage with the website” Taidgh Pledger, National Campaign Manager, NEU

The primary outcomes from this phase were that:

  1. we needed to make the data meaningful — schools had lost so much funding, but it was hard to imagine the impact until that money was put into a real-life context. Also, we wanted to use a positive tone to show site visitors what might happen to their school if they had the money back in the school budget.
  2. the site needed a larger colour range so that the product did not look affiliated to any political party and made the school cards easier to use – there is a lot of information when you deep dive into school.
  3. local and national events were needed on the site.

Phase 3 – Design Phase

“Outlandish came up with really exciting proposals that would completely refresh the website and deliver on the areas that users felt needed improving. We were very conscious of not wanting to get away from what had made the campaign successful so far, and the team were great at keeping this in consideration when formulating new ideas” Taidgh Pledger, National Campaign Manager, NEU

Image showing the School Cuts new designs for map view for desktop and mobile

Taking the User Research insights, our talented Designer Fran Cook took on the challenge of re-imaging the School Cuts website utilising common design patterns for digital map interactions and accessibility best practice. She also introduced additional colours into the mature campaign colour palette.

The Tech

We used Vuejs components and Google Maps in a WordPress site, using a Laravel-based api

Going On

Our partnership with the NEU team on the School Cuts website is ongoing and we are proud to be supporting such an important campaign.