Elevating digital transformation in further education: a guide for senior leaders

Making digital everyone’s business

“Digital and data cuts across every single thing we do.”

– Kerry Heathcote, College of West Anglia

Digital technology underpins nearly every part of a further education organisation. The learner journey is mapped across multiple platforms, starting with pre-arrival and induction, continuing through daily interactions and learning support, through to their next steps in education, employment or life. At every stage, digital and data play a central role, shaping and tracking the student experience.

So, where do you begin when designing a strategy that needs to account for so many interconnected parts? At the same time, your organisation must hold a forward-looking vision, one that is both ambitious and realistic. In such a fast-evolving landscape, how do you begin to map your progress and reflect on your direction?

That’s where the digital elevation tool can help. It breaks down the complexity into five key themes:

• Leadership, culture and governance
• Learner experience
• Staff experience
• Curriculum development
• Underpinning technologies

Each theme includes validation statements to help you reflect on where you are. You score each statement using one of four options: complete, not started, in progress or not a priority. Based on your responses, the digital elevation tool categorises your organisation’s maturity in each theme into one of three levels:

• Foundation – essential elements you must have in place
• Transform – elements you should have in place
• Elevate – aspirational elements you could have in place

The digital elevation tool can also calculate your overall progress at each level, offering a snapshot of where your organisation currently stands. You can choose to focus on all five themes or only those most relevant to your immediate strategic goals.

This level of insight is unmatched in the further education sector. The digital elevation tool not only highlights sector-wide priorities but also helps organisations focus their time, energy, and investment where they are needed most. Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining a mature strategy, the digital elevation tool provides practical guidance and aspirational benchmarks to support whole-college transformation.

For senior leadership teams, it offers a strategic lens, a way to understand your current position, visualise best practice, and clarify what success looks like. It also surfaces the key challenges you’ll need to tackle on your path toward digital maturity.

“The digital elevation tool played a pivotal role in aligning with the Welsh Government’s Digital 2030 aspirations.”

– Chris Ford, The College Merthyr Tydfil

Chris shared how the digital elevation tool helped the college clarify its vision, set ambitious but realistic goals, and prioritise essential infrastructure investments, including servers, wifi, and systems integration. These foundational upgrades were critical to enabling more advanced digital innovation. The digital elevation tool offered a stable, sector-specific framework and a manageable path forward. Chris also emphasised the value of using the digital elevation tool as a living tool, something to revisit regularly in response to rapid technological change.

Turning insight into strategy

Once you complete the digital elevation tool, you can use the findings as a solid foundation for developing a digital strategy, or to inform a broader, more integrated whole-college approach. The digital elevation tool’s five core themes offer a clear structure for shaping your vision, drawing on components from foundation through to elevate. In an environment of rapid change, it provides much needed stability and clarity.

While your strategy may include some immediate, achievable goals, the digital elevation tool will also highlight where more deliberate planning, investment and resourcing are required. As Stacy Vipas from Askham Bryan College in York noted, one of the greatest benefits of using the digital elevation tool was that it “opened their eyes to what others were doing”. After a detailed review of the validation statements, the college created five digital principles that embodied their strategic intent. Stacy reflected that the digital elevation tool helped them grasp the scale of the landscape and in doing so, laid the groundwork for a more focused and achievable strategy.

“We used the digital elevation tool as a compass to guide us, not a locked-in set of coordinates.”

– Stacy Vipas, Askham Bryan College

Their resulting priorities included encouraging bring-your-own-device policies, enhancing mixed reality applications, embracing AI and automation, integrating relevant technologies across the curriculum, and ensuring system accessibility. Stacy also acknowledged the critical importance of addressing learner experience and staff support, particularly in light of limited resources and varying digital confidence among staff.

At Activate Learning, Sharmen Ibrahim described the digital elevation tool as a “map they mastered” at a time when writing a three-year strategy felt especially daunting, given the ever-changing digital landscape. The digital elevation tool gave them a clear baseline, identified priority areas and provided a strong starting point.

“The digital elevation tool was a great scanning tool”, she said, helping to evidence areas for greater focus, such as boosting staff confidence with digital technologies.

At Borders College in Scotland, Conor Bradley adopted a reverse-engineering approach, using the digital elevation tool to help define a pathway toward the highest levels of digital transformation. The digital elevation tool also serves as a tool for measuring progress against their strategy, offering a more concrete understanding of digital capability across different departments. This approach is particularly useful if your existing strategy is reaching the end of its lifecycle, allowing you to assess progress, celebrate wins and identify areas still needing attention in order to advance.

From a collaborative leadership perspective, Kerry Heathcote and Clare Pelling from the College of West Anglia have used the digital elevation tool as a strategic development and reporting tool. Working alongside other college leadership team members including the head of IT and head of learning improvement, they regularly review and rescore their digital elevation tool results, sharing progress with governors. Their ambition is clear, to reach at least 70% elevation by 2028, a target that’s well underway.

If you’re looking for additional guidance on building a digital strategy, we recommend reading our road map to digital transformation blog post by Allen Crawford-Thomas.

Embedding digital into everyday practice

The pandemic accelerated digital progress across the further education sector, pushing organisations to innovate at speed. While this rapid shift brought advances in some areas, it also left gaps in foundational confidence, particularly among staff who may still feel hesitant to experiment with new approaches in front of a class.

One of core strengths of the digital elevation tool is its ability to support and shape your organisation’s digital culture. Clare Pelling, from the College of West Anglia describes their digital culture as “growing, but with a spiky profile”. With new staff, evolving roles and shifting priorities, the landscape is always changing. Clare emphasises the importance of tools such as our building digital capability service, which can offer structure and focus for staff development.

Kerry Heathcote, also from the College of West Anglia, highlights the value of setting the tone from the top. An aspirational digital strategy, she says, shows staff that digital transformation isn’t just a passing trend, it’s a long-term, strategic commitment. That kind of clarity helps build trust, boost confidence and bring people with you.

Embedding digital culture can’t sit with one person or department. To implement your vision, all key stakeholders must be involved. Whether you incorporate the digital elevation tool into existing strategy groups or create new implementation methods, the essential question is: Are we aligned on our goals, or do we need to rethink how we’re working? While your main focus might be on the learner experience, it’s crucial to reflect on how the other digital elevation tool themes, such as staff experience, governance, or technology are influencing your culture and outcomes.

Small wins can be good motivators. They build momentum, generate a sense of progress and encourage wider participation. As Sharmen Ibrahim from Activate Learning points out:

“It’s important to take a breath sometimes and pat ourselves on the back when we reach a particular milestone. There is self-recognition and a time to be proud, and it’s important we recognise this.”

By celebrating progress, you help establish a culture of positivity and shared purpose, one that invites people in rather than leave them behind.

Driving whole college implementation

Once your strategy is finalised, or if you’re using the digital elevation tool to evaluate an existing one, the focus naturally shifts to operational delivery. This is where strategic intent becomes a whole organisation action. At this stage, it’s essential to consider how individuals and teams contribute to making the strategy a success.

Your staff play a critical role, and gaining their buy-in is essential. There are various ways to embed your strategy into the heart of your organisation’s ethos. Some colleges establish a dedicated digital transformation group made up of key stakeholders, while others build on existing groups to carry the work forward.

At the College of West Anglia, Kerry Heathcote shared a different approach, rather than setting up a new group, they embedded it into more than 40 existing area performance review exercises. For them, an iterative model works best, it wasn’t necessary for every team to have the full strategy in hand, but rather for each group to operate as a digital working group with aligned goals.

The digital elevation tool, when used in its entirety, provides insight into every part of the organisation. Once your focused areas are identified, the digital elevation tool allows you to pinpoint strengths and areas for development in detail. For example, under the leadership and governance theme, some colleges have appointed a digital link governor to help drive operational progress across the foundation, transform and elevate levels.

At College of West Anglia, governors became actively involved in reviewing digital elevation tool outcomes. This engagement prompted new ideas and a desire to be more connected to digital progress. The college created a SharePoint portal tailored for governors, with role-specific access levels. Digitising this process not only improved communication and accessibility, but also enabled governors to better understand sector benchmarks, resourcing needs and inclusivity goals. Through this, governors gained a clearer picture of progress, highlighting the digital elevation tool’s role in offering an informed, transparent view.

If you’re facing capacity challenges, Rhydian Williams from Adult Learning Wales recommends focusing on the 20% of effort that delivers the greatest impact. For example, engaging your learning experience committee early in the process could help define that 20%. Empowering others to lead and contribute provides clarity, distributes responsibility and builds organisational momentum.

At Activate Learning, in response to the fast-changing digital landscape, an annual impact statement model was adopted. This approach focused on clear intent and implementation, allowing for agile adaptation to technological developments. Team members took responsibility for different sections of the strategy, with each person responsible for areas such as leadership, curriculum, and staff development.

Sharmen Ibrahim explained that while senior leaders focused on strategic outcomes, middle and upper managers used the digital elevation tool to assess specific needs. The detailed nature of the digital elevation tool made it especially valuable for managers, enabling them to present well-evidenced priorities, such as staff confidence or cyber security, to leadership. The digital elevation tool also helped them identify key areas such as AI, extended realities, and immersive technologies, which now feed into their annual reporting cycle and will inform their next five-year strategy beginning in 2025.

It's important to remember that the digital elevation tool does not operate in isolation. If you’ve used it to shape your strategy, we provide other tools that can support operational delivery. The digital experience insights service, for example, offers rich data from staff and students about their digital experiences, giving you clear, evidence-based direction. If the insights differ from your initial assumptions, you can revisit and revise your digital elevation tool approach to reflect new priorities.

Similarly, the building digital capability service offers digital diagnostic tools for staff and students, alongside a robust library of resources to help them grow in their identified areas of need. These services complement the digital elevation tool, allowing you to build a comprehensive, responsive digital ecosystem across your organisation.

Keeping on track

One of the key strengths of the digital elevation tool is its ability to measure progress over time, providing both a strategic and operational lens on digital transformation. Designed with flexibility in mind, the digital elevation tool allows you to complete sections or the entire tool at various intervals, then revisit it in six months or a year later to reassess and track your distance travelled against the areas of your choosing.

This functionality not only saves time but also generates clear, evidence-based reports that can support conversations with internal stakeholders in the organisation, auditors or external bodies. Whether you’re focusing on one theme or the full digital landscape, the digital elevation tool provides a snapshot of where your organisation stands and how far it’s come.

Rhydian Williams from Adult Learning Wales highlights that the digital elevation tool provided clear tasks to work on, feeding directly into operational plans. He explains:

“Using digital is easy but it’s enhancing what you do that’s important eg delivering in the areas of inclusion and accessibility.”

Rhydian’s team embedded the digital elevation tool into their management dashboards, making it visible to senior leaders, the chief executive and governors. It also became a focal point during strategic away days.

Rhydian went one step further, exporting digital elevation tool content into Microsoft Lists to gain an operational overview. This enabled the creation of multiple action plans that were easy to filter by individual responsibility. He adds:

“You can concentrate on your piece of the pie and not worry about the entirety of it. We can come together at the end to see the magnitude of it.”

This approach made accountability clearer and progress more transparent across teams.

At Borders College, Scotland, Conor Bradley found the digital elevation tool particularly effective for underpinning technologies. These areas often involve more straightforward, task-based deliverables with practical timelines, such as achieving cyber essentials accreditation. He notes that while some goals require longer project timelines, the digital elevation tool helps define what needs to be measured and achieved. It also offers clarity on how to prioritise infrastructure development and create a clearer vision. Conor emphasises that the digital elevation tool is not just about planning, it provides concrete metrics and strategic prompts, influencing everything from student induction experiences to specific digital projects. For them, the digital elevation tool remains visible throughout the year to ensure continuous assessment and momentum.

Kerry Heathcote from the College of West Anglia stresses the importance of honest self-assessment. Regular digital elevation tool reviews help ensure alignment with quality improvement plans and governance requirements. Clare Pelling echoes this, highlighting that:

“The data-driven approach removes emotion and provides a clear perspective on achievements.”

This clarity has helped identify both progress and areas still requiring attention, even where certain priorities may not yet be fully relevant.

Ultimately, the digital elevation tool invites reflection on practical implementation, impact and inclusivity. As one user puts it:

“What’s the point in having everything if you’re not using it well?”

The digital elevation tool helps organisations focus their efforts and ensure that digital transformation is meaningful even when some aspects are not yet fully relevant.

A strategic reality check

Working through the full digital elevation tool can be an uncomfortable experience. It’s designed to be a reality check. Often, organisations discover they aren’t as far along their digital journey as they believed. But that honesty can be empowering. From a senior leadership perspective, understanding your exact starting point provides a solid foundation for meaningful progress. If you can clearly see the problems, you can begin addressing them step by step.

The digital elevation tool acts as a window into your organisation and the wider sector, helping leaders make informed decisions about where to focus investment, particularly in a resource-constrained further education landscape.

At Activate Learning, Sharmen Ibrahim recalls how their initial digital elevation tool assessment uncovered gaps in both staff and student confidence with digital tools. This gave them a clear baseline. They asked the curriculum teams “how do you take curriculum to the next level?”  The response was a focus on an ambitious, engaging curriculum that embeds digital skills throughout the student experience, not just around exams or accreditation. To support this they also worked closely with the building digital capabilities service to further develop their staff’s digital confidence.

At the College of West Anglia, regular digital elevation tool reviews have become part of quality improvement and area review meetings, prompting valuable conversations across departments. One example is the push to digitise resources, a worthy goal but only if foundational barriers like data poverty are addressed first. As Kerry Heathcote notes:

“What’s the point in having everything digitised for students that don't have laptops or tablets to allow them to access the resources in the first place?”

Real progress requires a realistic, inclusive approach.

The digital elevation tool supports this by helping colleges identify disparities and prioritise the work that matters most. It doesn’t pay to report only what’s going well, success needs to be organisation wide. As Kerry highlights, every area must work toward shared goals to build true digital maturity.

Ultimately, being honest with your digital elevation tool responses is essential to tackling digital inequality. There’s little point in rating yourself at the “elevate” category if you’ve invested in the latest shiny virtual reality equipment that no one is using. Used effectively, the digital elevation tool offers a balanced, evidence-based perspective, one that promotes fairness, transparency and genuine transformation across the whole organisation.