Last week A-level results dropped.
And a video popped up in my YouTube subscriptions from GOV.UK suggesting that students download the GOV.UK app to search GOV.UK for what to do next.
It’s a bit odd when we already have an app for searching the web. A browser.
OK, I accept that’s a cheap shot from someone who is GOV.UK-app-sceptical at the best of times. So let me acknowledge that the published ambition is bigger than search: personalisation, proactive support, services inside the app and agents that help people do things.
But the video got under my skin because it’s just showing off search behind authentication inside an app.
Search is useful. Guidance is useful. The app needs to offer search. But if the selling point on results day is that the app does something any browser already does perfectly well, without the hassle of a download and a login, then let’s be honest: that’s a weak answer to the question of what the app is actually for.
Authentication is useful if what you get in return can actually know something about you, remember what you were doing and help you get on with it. If all you get is public search, it is mostly friction.
But the thing bothering me isn’t really that GOV.UK has put search in an app.
It’s that the app gives us a good view of the much more interesting problem underneath. Government increasingly has bits of information, infrastructure and services that could make somebody’s journey through a moment like results day genuinely easier. Yet the person still too often experiences those bits as separate institutions, separate forms and another search box.
So this is really a post about the plumbing, and what becomes possible when we finally join enough of it up.
Obviously it wouldn’t have helped anyone to watch a fake video of a future that doesn’t yet exist. But there is a good future that could exist.
And results day is a good test because results aren’t just information; they’re an event.
These results trigger things. Lives change on results day. A university offer became a confirmed place, or it didn’t. Clearing suddenly mattered. That might change student finance, or make a different apprenticeship or job (im)possible. The interesting thing about the grade is what it unlocks.
That’s the bit I’m interested in. Not putting the result somewhere digital for the sake of it, but allowing something newly true about somebody to change what they need to see and do next.
So, am I saying the GOV.UK video should have shown results being revealed in the app?
On that I’m not so sure.
There is something special about the theatre of results day: going back into school, seeing the teachers who helped get you there, opening the envelope alongside friends you’ve spent years heading towards that same morning, and having somebody who knows you really well on hand if the grades aren’t what you hoped and planned for.
We don’t need digital to elbow its way into every meaningful human moment. Those envelopes are a feature, not a bug.
But once you’ve had that tactile moment, then the digital bit should become much more useful.
Thankfully some of the plumbing is already in place. UCAS receives the results and passes them to universities so offers can be confirmed.
But imagine the results day experience catching up with the machinery. Your place is confirmed and the things which require no action quietly disappear. If something has changed, you see the few things you actually need to sort out. Later, when your qualifications need proving, they’re already there rather than waiting to be typed into another box.
That feels much closer to what proactive ought to mean. Not another notification telling you something happened. The useful bit is that, because it happened, the service now behaves differently.
That’s the straightforward path.
The video itself gives us a more complex one: Disabled Students’ Allowance and, for some reason, an overwhelming page of search results proudly displayed inside the app.1
Many young people looking for support at university did not acquire that need yesterday morning. There may already have been years of classroom adjustments, assessments, health appointments, SEND support, parents advocating and people stretching school budgets so somebody could participate and flourish.
Life has already been happening.
Qualifications are the easier case. Support needs are messier. They can change, they are sensitive, and what matters in one setting may not be what matters in another. But in both cases the challenge is whether crossing an institutional boundary means the person has to begin again.
That doesn’t mean everything one institution knows should automatically flow everywhere else. DSA rightly needs its own assessment of what support is appropriate in higher education.
But crossing from school into university shouldn’t trigger institutional amnesia either. Continuity doesn’t have to mean indiscriminate data sharing; privacy shouldn’t have to mean starting again. How does transformed government make it easier for somebody to carry appropriate evidence with them, on their terms, so that the next conversation starts closer to what do you need now? than tell me everything again?
That is a hard problem. But that’s rather the point of doing the hard work to make things simple, instead of settling for search and starting again.
Qualifications give us an easier version of the same problem, and a clearer place to see what solving it might look like.
A qualification can often be known authoritatively, checked and reused. And that’s something we’d already been playing with while imagining the future of jobs and careers support: what changes when a service can actually rely on something being true?
Did you know that there is such a thing as a Personal Learning Record?
I don’t have one, I’m too old, but the PLR is a permanent DfE-held online record of qualifications. You should follow that link and marvel at the mildly wonderful experience waiting for you: download a form, prove your identity, email it in, wait for the record to come back by email. Potentially a month later. For access to “a permanent online record”.
One of our jobs and careers fireworks imagined what that could look like inside an imagined version of the replacement jobs board: somebody connects to the PLR, finds their trusted qualifications, chooses which ones to use, reviews what will change, and adds them to their trusted career profile.
There are a number of fireworks like that in Gizza Job (on which some blog posts to come) but the interesting thing here isn’t ‘can we move some data between some screens’. It’s what becomes possible when another service can rely on something being true.
And the interesting bit isn’t just having trusted information sitting there.
Instead of merely returning vacancies, a jobs service could use that trusted information alongside what somebody tells it about themselves to better understand what they’re already equipped to do, show the gap between that and the job they want, and help find the training or experience that closes it.
And it can work in the other direction too. An employer who needs to know that I have the right to work, a particular qualification or some professional status shouldn’t necessarily need me to find, scan and reconstruct the evidence every time. Government is already authoritative for some of those facts.
That doesn’t mean the state certifying me, still less certifying my whole CV. Most of my profile would still be me talking about myself. But where useful, I could choose to back bits of it up with things government already knows.
And that is the kind of capability that could make an app interesting.
Not because any of this is uniquely possible in an app. It isn’t. But because once there is a persistent personal government surface, the useful thing about it should be that it can do more than send me back to search.
It might remember something useful about me, help me prove something without starting again, or notice that something has changed and help me do whatever follows.
Alas, it seems a bit like science fiction.
But it shouldn’t.
PLR already exists. DfE is separately giving some Year 11 pupils access to an Education Record2 containing qualifications and information about financial or learning support needs. GOV.UK Wallet is the route for issuing verifiable credentials using open standards. One Login and some kind of digital identity will presumably survive despite the cancellation of the national digital identity programme.
These are different capabilities at different stages, not bits of Lego waiting to be snapped together. But the ideas underneath them are very real. And elsewhere government is already working on services that only really make sense if some of this continuity becomes possible.
The jobs and careers service is being built around lifelong, personalised support, smart matching, skills and access to humans when needed. Meanwhile the GOV.UK app roadmap describes GDS experimenting with an agent to help 16-to-24-year-olds explore careers, jobs, training and apprenticeships.
Taken together, you can see an experience emerging here, whether or not those pieces are yet being treated as one coherent thing behind the scenes. The ingredients won’t assemble themselves. But the opportunity is real, and it ought to be really good.
And this is where we end up back at the plumbing underneath the app, and whether somebody’s actual journey through government is getting any easier. I’ve described this before as pipes before pixels, in my earlier reflection on the app and my dreams of Goths3.
The shiny frontage is not the transformation. The transformation is the capability behind it: services, rules and information working together well enough for government to respond differently when a person’s circumstances change.
And if that capability is designed around the person and their journey, it should be able to turn up wherever it’s useful: in the app, on the website, in front of a careers adviser, at school or in a Jobcentre.
Which is why none of this should really be built for the app. Build the underlying service properly and let the app be one brilliant expression of it.
That doesn’t make the app irrelevant. It gives the app a reason to exist.
Fortunately, results day happens every year. I’m not expecting the seams of government to disappear, but with so many relevant things bubbling away, I do hope next August is materially more coherent.
I would love this post to age incredibly badly. I would be delighted if the excellent people working on this are already rolling their eyes at my whinging because they’re knee deep in bringing a more personalised and connected government to life.
Because I don’t want the communications team to make a more ambitious video next year. I want them to have a more ambitious reality to film, one where the best reason for installing the GOV.UK app is considerably more interesting than search.
Apps are pointless unless you actually app with them.
- It was also a bit incongruous to be using capital lettered services and not the underlying user needs. ↩︎
- Should you follow that link I think you might have some questions about spend controls and service assessments and the general quality of what’s happened to any discipline around the single government domain… ↩︎
- GOV.UK on the High Street ↩︎