Ark Curriculum Plus (AC+): managing 10,000+ teaching resources with Totara

Ark Curriculum Plus (AC+), part of Ark, one of the UK’s largest education charities, delivers subject excellence programmes used by thousands of teachers across hundreds of schools and Multi-Academy Trusts (MATs). Its Mastery curriculum supports both primary and secondary education across English, Maths, Science and Geography.

As the organisation expanded, AC+ required a learning platform capable of supporting a growing content library, complex organisational structures and multiple user groups, while providing a simpler experience for teachers and school administrators.

The Challenge

AC+ needed to replace its legacy LMS with a platform that could better support its content, users and operational processes.

Key challenges included:

• Managing a library of more than 10,000 resources. Content management tools were too limited for the scale at which AC+ operates. Video content was stored in a proprietary playlists feature outside the resource library and carried no metadata. Across the rest of the library, free-text tagging resulted in duplicate tags, spelling variations and inconsistent naming, making the resource library difficult to manage.
• Improving the Salesforce integration. School membership, programme entitlements and tier information are managed in Salesforce through a third-party integration partner. The connection between Salesforce and the LMS had become fragile, making reporting on teacher engagement by programme, tier and key stage slower and more manual than required.

• Simplifying user management for school administrators. School administrators, known as Mastery Leads, could add, remove and reset teacher accounts, but the user experience was confusing enough that AC+ support teams regularly received requests for help with routine administrative tasks.
• Managing multiple user roles and access levels. Multiple audiences: Mastery Leads (school-level admins), Teachers (typical users, who need to access and engage with content and events within only their allowed combination of programmes), Development Leads (AC+-employed, wider remit) and Associate Development Leads (freelancers responsible for a defined set of schools). The legacy setup had no mechanism to enforce these distinctions.
• A user experience that needed to be quicker and simpler. Across every workstream, the goal was to make it easier for users to find what they needed at the point of need, whether that meant adding a teacher, finding a recently viewed resource or booking onto live Zoom training. The new platform had to be simple, thoroughly user-tested and flexible enough to deliver tailored views to different audiences.

The Solution

Accipio delivered a fully customised Totara Learn platform, deeply integrated with AC+’s existing operational stack and tailored to the cascading way schools and MATs actually work.

Resource management at scale:

• Accipio built Accipio CMS as a purpose-built content management layer for Totara to handle AC+’s 10,000+ resources, with proper metadata, structured tagging and validation.
• A full custom migration script was written to pull every legacy resource, including orphaned video content, into the new CMS with clean, structured metadata.
• Leveraged LibreLambda which allows users to preview every uploaded file, including pptx, xlsx and docx files rendered to PDF, before downloading. This is important on a file-heavy platform where teachers need to triage resources quickly.

Modelling the real organisational structure

• Used Totara’s cascading hierarchies to replicate MAT structures, then schools within MATs, then departments within schools (each with its own admin managing that department’s teachers). This enables full cascading reporting from the MAT down to the individual subject.
• Used Salesforce-driven org metadata and dynamic audiences to automatically enrol teachers into the right courses and resource banks based on subject, key stage and tier, removing the need for manual enrolment.

Extended enterprise self-service

• Deployed and customised Accipio’s Organisation Manager so Mastery Leads can administer their own users – adding, removing, suspending, resetting and resending welcome emails – without contacting AC+ support.
• Clean role separation was implemented between Mastery Leads, Development Leads and Associate Development Leads, each with the right scope of access and reporting visibility.

The result

The migration of this organisation-critical platform was completed with minimal disruption. This was a substantial systems and digital change for AC+ and its customers, but customer support queries returned to their normal daily baseline within two weeks of go-live.

User satisfaction was also validated through AC+’s annual customer survey, which received hundreds of responses. 70% of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with the move to the new MyMastery platform, while 25% were neutral. For a platform migration of this scale, AC+ viewed this as a positive result, as it suggested the change did not disrupt users’ day-to-day work.

Strong qualitative feedback was also captured throughout user research, iterative testing and post-launch activity. Year-to-date renewals and new sales are tracking positively, providing early signs that the platform is supporting commercial momentum.

AC+ is now expanding the platform to new use cases. In June, Ark Teacher Training is being brought onto the same platform, supporting teacher mentors, ATT leads and trainee teachers as new extended enterprise audiences within MyMastery.

AC+ and Accipio continue to develop new functionality and blocks together post-launch, treating the platform as a living product rather than a completed project.