The General Teaching Council for Scotland (GTC Scotland) is the independent regulator for teachers in Scotland. They work in the public interest to enhance trust in teachers by setting, upholding and promoting high standards.
They serve the 80,000+ teachers and college lecturers registered in Scotland, along with the various groups that support them maintaining their registration.
During the 19 months that I spent working in-house at GTC Scotland, from Sept 2023 to March 2025, I built them a new website, refined elements of their visual language, created new systems of automation to streamline services, improved the usability of various digital products/publications and created the core design for their new MyGTCS platform.
When I joined the organisation it was originally in a content role, which included responsibility for the website. I still remember well the moment in my interview when I described the existing site as a “poisoned chalice”. I really don’t mince my words and believe that proportional communication is important when building and maintain relationships.
I used to be a teacher...
There were several key issues I encountered when looking at the site:
The existing site, built on WordPress, was the biggest I had come across during my professional life. Like most WordPress sites I have encountered, the content, with the exception of the news posts (let’s not forget what WordPress was created for and excelled at back then) was all static. Everything placed and maintained manually every time.
Navigating the existing site was like playing pin the tail on the donkey. The search facility not helping to fill the gap created by having an unclear navigation structure… with a search facility that couldn’t find a haystack in a needle.
Having built and maintained many websites over the years using Squarespace, Weebly, Wix and WordPress, I knew that the challenges faced were not going to be overcome by staying on that platform.
It was time for a change and I quickly mocked up a new homepage in Webflow to show a taste of my vision for the site.
A month later, work began on a rebuild.
To understand more about why, since 2021 I have been a Webflow designer and developer, check out this blog post.
Before starting work in Webflow, we needed to address the issues around content length, site/page structure and the move from static to dynamic content (anything that lives in a database, rather than being manually authored on each page). We:
Over the next three months
This was to be a fast build for a site of such a size
To address the issues around navigating and find content we:
Beyond the look of the new website…
The MyGTCS platform is used by the 80,000+ teachers and college lecturers registered in Scotland to maintain their registration and record their professional development.
Work had begun with service design provided by BJSS/Sparcks based on several workshops with key stakeholders.
I then took their proposed system maps and developed them into a complete design.
To describe this as complex would be too simple.
As has always been the case for me, when faced with such complexitiy, I need a physical space in which to construct. So I comandered a room and all three walls and the glass front of it quickly become cover in workflows, relationship diagrams and screen mockups. Then slowly over manay many weeks, with many many meetings with senior staff, business analysts and key staff, we eventually matured the orginal design idea into a fully formed initial design for the smallest, but most complex user group.
The trouble with having the ability to wear many hats as I can, and the desire for excellence is that one can end up being stretched too thin and taking on too much.