Bradford College and BeReady’s LMS for trainee teachers saves £100,000 a year

Bradford College is a further and higher education college in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, with approximately 25,000 students.

They worked with BeReady – a learning and development organization that specializes in delivering funded online training to schools and colleges across the UK.

The Challenge

A third of UK teachers leave the profession within five years. Due to the impact of COVID-19, the UK education sector had experienced a reduction of newly qualified teachers entering the profession. Barriers for gaining this qualification are namely finances, time and course location. COVID-19 presented new challenges, with schools shutting, many training providers unable to deliver classes and much of the population unwilling or unable to interact outside of their COVID-19 bubbles.

Leading teacher training provider Bradford College partnered with Totara customer BeReady to create a solution that would enable their school partners across the country to continue training new teachers (that they could not access otherwise) and to help reduce the impact of people leaving the profession.

Bradford College already delivered apprenticeships, but this was only delivered face-to-face, which meant they could only deliver to local students at significant cost and using outdated systems.

The Solution

In partnership with Accipio – a Totara Platinum Alliance Partner – Bradford College and BeReady worked together to rapidly deploy a new Totara learning platform. This leveraged BeReady’s and Accipio’s existing platform expertise, thus negating the need to go through a risky and arduous procurement and implementation exercise.

The platform has both digital learning and an integrated ePortfolio system to manage apprenticeship delivery, which removes the need for two separate platforms that don’t talk to each other. The partnership called upon BeReady’s digital production expertise, taking traditional classroom learning assets, enriching them through animation and design and ensuring that they were able to be delivered in a digital format.

Apprenticeship delivery is complex and heavily regulated with oversight from Ofsted and the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA). The platform allows the program to be fully compliant with the rigorous requirements of both the funding agency and the schools inspectorate. Enabling learners and mentors to access content, post results, interact with lecturers and peers and log all activities and course work.

The platform provides a custom journey for the different types of users. Totara’s flexibility provides learners, mentors, tutors and lecturers with different access rights and user experiences while ensuring that the interaction between them is smooth and seamless. The relatively small amount of required user support enables the team to spend their time building content and delivering additional value to the learners.

The Results

This project has been exceptionally successful, and it is expected to scale dramatically in the coming year. It delivered a sustainable career pathway for teaching assistants to become teachers. Funded by the Apprenticeship Levy, it reduced financial pressure upon schools when budgets are significantly overstretched.

Key results included:

• Rapid deployment – This fully digital solution was created using Totara Learn in less than six weeks. This includes everything needed to deliver an apprenticeship standard, including content, learning journeys and Ofsted/ESFA compliance
• Overhauled their approach to delivering apprenticeships – Together, Accipio and BeReady have overhauled Bradford College’s approach to delivering apprenticeships and created a single platform which delivers both the online learning and the ePortfolio requirements, helping them manage the end-to-end process. This replaced the previous clunky file-based systems with a single Totara platform (with no need for multiple systems)
• Cost savings – Compared with delivering face-to-face training, the platform provides significant savings. This is estimated to be over £100,000 per annum (including travel costs, consolidating platforms and delivery methods, automation for compliance tracking and administration etc.). These numbers will rise year on year.
• Access to a new market and income generation – Without the platform, Bradford College could only deliver to local students. The platform enabled them to recruit nationally and deliver to a very high standard
• Completion rates – Hundreds of aspiring teachers from across the UK are enrolled onto a program, and completion rates are on track to be over 95%. The first graduates will become fully qualified teachers shortly.
• Achieving career goals during COVID – This fully digital solution can now ensure that those amazing teaching assistants who previously were unable to achieve their career goals are now able to inspire the next generation as fully qualified teachers. The flexibility that the Totara platform overcame not just the unprecedented COVID challenge, but also the challenge for aspiring teachers with childcare commitments that was previously very challenging to overcome, by minimizing travel requirements.

“Accipio and Totara have been instrumental in helping us deliver a solution to the teaching resource crisis that has engulfed UK schools because of COVID-19. The flexibility shown throughout this project has now enabled us to launch additional programs and bring more partners on board.”
– Kyle Burrows, CEO, BeReady Group