Colindale School
Primary school
Colindale School’s child-friendly website and home learning hub gets the thumbs-up from students, parents and Osfted.
The challenge
Colindale is a north London primary school with 750 children from nursery to Year 6. The new head teacher wanted to improve and update its website to better reflect the school’s diversity, child-centred ethos and meet Ofsted requirements. It needed to be distinctive, child-friendly, professional and equally appealing to, pupils, parents and prospective families without being too formal.
The solution
Colindale School serves a vibrant and diverse community and they wanted a visually-striking design to reflect that. Staff also needed a communication hub for parents and a trusted, easy source of information for prospective parents.
We used the school’s rainbow logo as inspiration for the new site’s look and feel. Fun, colourful and instantly recognisable, the logo provides reassuring continuity. We created a bold contemporary design with simple, clearly laid out pages which are easy to navigate.
A News section provides a place for all general parent information. It has a noticeboard feature to highlight significant landmarks or achievements. This section can be filtered to show letters, newsletters and forms. A separate Calendar is a handy way to see term times, meetings and events.
As with all our projects, it was vital the new website looked great and was user-friendly on all devices. At every stage of the design and development, we ensured that the content was clear, well-organised and easy to navigate, with the school’s policies well-positioned, in order to meet Ofsted requirements.
Post launch, we were asked to add a new Home Learning section with dedicated pages for each year group, including exercises, learning ideas and useful links across all topics and subjects.
Our Gold Care plan gives school staff access to ongoing support and protection.
The results
- Shortly after launch, the website was getting over 2,000 unique visitors a month, spending an average of 1.5 minutes on each page
- The new Home Learning pages attracted over 900 unique visitors in the first two months
- Ofsted inspectors gave positive comments about the website during a short inspection of the school in June, 2018
The website
“I’ve worked with Louise and her team on four different school websites over the last 10 years. Every time we’ve worked together, I’ve been thoroughly pleased with the process and the result. With Colindale, Louise took the time to understand our vision and suggested innovative solutions in order to achieve it. Our aim was to create a website that really celebrated our school and the finished article does just that! It has also had a hugely positive impact on our communication with parents and the wider community. Working with Indigo Tree is a pleasure, there is regular communication and timings are always met. I am frequently recommending them to colleagues in the Education sector.”
lucy rodgers | head teacher | colindale primary school
