Ofsted

Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills) is a government department responsible for inspecting and regulating education and care provision across England.

With around 2,000 employees, Ofsted’s mission is to raise standards and improve lives by ensuring high-quality education and care for children, young people, and learners of all ages.   

Ofsted and Node4 have a successful, long-standing relationship that spans over a decade. During that time, we have delivered managed services and support alongside day-to-day consultancy and collaboration on various IT-related projects. 

“Node4 recently carried out a significant intranet upgrade,” explains Athene Sherwood, Deputy Head of Internal Communications, Ofsted. “The work we’ve done with Node4 over the last couple of years gave us access to the latest version of Microsoft SharePoint and far more control over how our content was developed and shared. It was a great success and led to more employees using the intranet on a regular basis, as well as getting more from it.” 

 “We’d heard about wonderwalls, informal social media-style platforms where colleagues can publicly acknowledge and celebrate outstanding work. We thought our colleagues would value something interactive like a wonderwall, so we commissioned Node4 to build one on our new intranet platform.”

The response from Ofsted colleagues has been very positive, with nearly 150 submissions in the first month that the wonderwall went live and over 350 by three months. One staff member commented that it gives “a fantastic feel-good factor” and “is helping them to learn more about the work colleagues are involved in, which is also helpful from a networking and collaboration perspective.” 

“It’s colourful and engaging and contributors can personalise their praise for colleagues for all to see. Plus, from a practical point of view, because it runs on SharePoint through our intranet, there were no steep learning curves, meaning we could manage it largely in-house from day one.”