Run by Dan Edwards, Woodcroft School, is a north east London primary school for pupils with autism and complex educational needs – and a long time TLD client.

The Woodcroft Home School website

At the beginning of the lockdown, Dan asked us to create a new special area of the website called “Woodcroft Home School” This is password protected and only for students and parents, so they could keep connected with the school from home. He wrote recently about one student:

“Right at the start of lockdown we heard about one of our pupils who put his uniform on every morning at 9:00 so he could feel like he was still at school. I was really grateful for that contact from his parents – and I’m happy to say that ever since then we’ve had new content for him every single school day so we can provide that contact in return.”

Inspiring content for students at home

During the lockdown, Woodcroft have been keeping open with 50% of the students attending, providing education on behalf of the government for certain groups of children.

And, at the same time, to help those students at home feel connected, their team of teachers and therapists have been creating content (videos, articles, information links, and images) for daily publishing, and every day there are 2-4 posts being published – so far over 120 different mini-stories and motivating posts.

Within this post you can see a few screenshots for the site.

It’s been a wonderful collaborative project for the TLD and Woodcroft teams. We have streamlined our workflow and daily we receive approved content which Amy uploads and formats to the site every morning. All videos are uploaded at a central point and embeded in posts, and we prepare as much as we can in advance.

Dan’s thoughts

Dan Edwards, managing director, sent me his thoughts about the site:

“We have a deliberately wide range of items for all ages and abilities, but it isn’t really about formal learning. It is mostly aimed at sharing the positive ethos of the school and being in touch with friends and staff daily. We are running a very complex timetable in school at the same time, so it has been great to be able to rely on Amy and Keren to keep the site flowing. For example, I often come up with an idea for a video or something at the last moment; or there may be a technical issue at our end because so many different people are generating content with their own basic equipment at home. We’ve also been using Top Left Design’s expertise to tweak the design elements as we go along, most recently with a full archive.

A simple solution

We discussed how best to prepare and divide up the content, and Dan came up with several categories with a specific font style for the images. These included:

• Friday Film Club – a licensed video uploaded for students to watch from home
• Stories from home – where teachers read from a storybook
• Learning and Therapy Resources
• Stanley’s Adventures – Children’s author and illustrator William Bee is a good friend of Woodcroft who offered his funny, colourful Stanley books to feature on the site.
• Information and Advice

As lockdown is lifted, they plan to continue to provide these added educational and entertaining videos. This site is password protected so we’ve included some screenshots here and we are happy to chat and share more about this project!

The school and has been a client of TLD for more than 10 years – and Dan was one of Keren’s favourite design teachers at the university she attended years before TLD existed!