Designing for the Classroom: How Tate Schools Is Rethinking Digital Learning with Art

What happens when a national museum stops asking “how do we make our collection available online?” and starts asking “what do teachers actually need?” The answer, as Tate’s Effie Coe explained at the Museum Digital Summit 2026, looks quite different from most museum digital education platforms.

When Tate set out to build a new digital learning platform for schools, the team began with a deliberately uncomfortable question: why would teachers want to engage with art through digital spaces at all? It was an honest starting point — and it set the tone for everything that followed.

The result is Tate Schools, a platform developed between 2023 and 2025 through a major digital infrastructure project and close collaboration between Tate’s Learning and Digital teams. Effie Coe, Curator of Digital Content in the schools and teachers team, presented the project at the Museum Digital Summit 2026, walking delegates through the design thinking, the teacher partnerships, and the SEND-first approach that shaped the platform from the ground up.

SEND — Special Educational Needs and Disabilities — is the term used in the UK education system to describe the range of learning differences, disabilities, and additional needs that may require specialist support in the classroom. It encompasses everything from sensory and physical disabilities to conditions such as autism, ADHD, and profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD). In a museum learning context, designing for SEND learners means thinking carefully about sensory experience, cognitive load, clear structure, and flexible delivery.

Starting from Classroom Reality

The founding insight behind Tate Schools was straightforward but easy to overlook: simply making content available is not enough. Digital learning resources are most powerful when they are shaped by classroom context and real teaching practice.

Rather than working outward from the collection and asking what could be adapted for schools, the team worked inward from the classroom — asking teachers what they needed, where current resources fell short, and what would make them confident enough to bring art into their lessons on a regular basis.

To do this systematically, Tate established a teacher friends group drawing on educators from across the UK — from the Shetland Islands and Newcastle to Birmingham, London, St. Ives, and Margate. Recruited through local networks and regional contacts, the group was designed to bring genuinely diverse expertise and classroom contexts into the process. Members meet regularly, with structured sessions complemented by surveys and follow-up discussions covering everything from sensitive content and curriculum development to usability, accessibility, and practical classroom application.

Crucially, teachers are not simply consulted at the end of the process — they help identify gaps and priorities in resource provision from the start, ensuring the platform reflects what teachers will actually use rather than what institutions assume they need.

A separate strand of the platform, Teacher Spotlight resources, takes this one step further. Each resource is co-created with an expert teacher and shares a real-world example of how they have used specific artworks in their teaching — giving other educators both permission and practical inspiration to try similar approaches.

An SEND-First Approach

One of the most distinctive aspects of Tate Schools is its commitment to an SEND-first design philosophy. Rather than building for a mainstream audience and adapting content for learners with additional needs, the team set out to create resources that are immediately relevant, engaging, and exciting for students with profound and multiple learning disabilities — without any adaptation required.

The logic behind this approach is compelling: resources designed to work for the most complex and diverse learners tend to work better for everyone.

The process began with one-to-one conversations with six SEND practitioners to understand how art-based digital resources are used in sensory classrooms and where the real barriers lie. From these conversations, a clear set of principles emerged: resources need to be intuitive, multisensory, structured in clear steps, and flexible enough to support different learners and contexts.

Two commissions illustrate what this looks like in practice. Lightbox, developed in collaboration with creative digital studio The Workers, is an interactive digital resource designed to support sensory and SEND learners through creative exploration with light, colour, and movement, connecting directly to artworks in Tate’s collection. It was shaped through iterative classroom testing, with teachers and students directly informing how it functions.

All The Feelings is the first commission in a new Immersion series — a video artwork created by artist India Harvey in collaboration with students and teachers in a special school setting. It invites learners into a playful, immersive experience using movement, sound, and sensory interaction to engage with emotion and creative expression. The Immersion series is designed to evolve, with a new artist commission introduced every two years to ensure fresh perspectives continue to shape how art is experienced in the classroom.

Transforming the Collection

At scale, Tate Schools now offers over 80 resources spanning key stages one to five, featuring more than 300 collection artists. Seventy-five percent of content foregrounds underrepresented artists in UK classrooms — including global majority artists, disabled artists, LGBTQ+ artists, working class artists, and women artists — and over 40% of resource series have been co-produced with artists, teachers, students, or sector peers.

This focus on representation is a direct response to evidence from the field. The Visual Eyes Report, a major study into race and inclusion in art education, found that teachers want to diversify their curriculum but need better resources to support them in doing so. Tate Schools is a practical answer to that need.

The platform organises resources across several core formats. Discover Art transforms collection works into a versatile series that refreshes and diversifies classroom references. Art Makes invites students into hands-on, curiosity-led art making inspired by Tate artworks, with step-by-step activities that encourage experimentation and personal creative choices. Artist Stories brings artists into the classroom in their own words through video and discussion prompts, while Meet The Artist goes further still — students encounter contemporary artists, learn about their journeys, and explore workshop-style questions alongside them.

Teachers can search resources by key stage, art form, or SEND accessibility, and use them flexibly as a full lesson, a short activity, or a source of creative inspiration.

A Collaborative Model

Building Tate Schools required genuine cross-team collaboration throughout — not just at launch, but across every stage of design, testing, and refinement. Curators, digital designers, learning specialists, and accessibility advisors all contributed, with communication and shared goals embedded into the process from the start.

Coe was frank about what this kind of collaboration demands: aligning creative vision, digital functionality, and classroom usability requires sustained effort, not a single kick-off meeting. External experts in the digital and education sectors were also brought in to advise on accessibility, usability, and pedagogical design.

The measure of success, as Coe put it, is ultimately the classroom itself. Teachers report that Tate Schools resources are helping them introduce contemporary art, stimulate discussion, and spark creative making. Students respond positively to interactive and sensory-rich activities, and teachers highlight the flexibility and accessibility of the resources as key to their value.

What Comes Next

Tate Schools is described as just beginning. Future plans include extending the Immersion series into the gallery space, introducing new digital tools to celebrate and share classroom creativity, and deepening the SEND-first approach through ongoing research and feedback.

The platform offers a model that will be of interest to any institution working at the intersection of digital learning and cultural collections — one that puts teacher insight, accessibility, and genuine classroom utility at the centre of the design process, rather than treating them as afterthoughts.

As Coe observed in closing: what happens when digital learning resources are designed collaboratively, with accessibility and classroom relevance at the forefront, is something meaningfully different from what most institutions currently produce. Tate Schools is an attempt to show what that difference looks like in practice.

Effie Coe presented at the Museum Digital Summit 2026. Tate Schools is available to explore at tate.org.uk/schools.