How Education Development Trust personalised early career teacher training with Totara

Education Development Trust (edt) is an international not-for-profit organisation that works to increase the life chances of individuals around the world via improved education and skills. Through detailed research and evidence-based insight, they deliver tailored programmes designed to make a measurable difference to education systems globally.

Executive Summary:

Edt partnered with the BuildEmpire team to create a platform capable of delivering a national learning programme for the Department for Education (DfE): the Early Career Training Programme (ECTP).

This statutory initiative supports thousands of teachers in their first two years post-qualification through core learning content and mentorship.

By leveraging the native flexibility of the Totara platform, BuildEmpire created a complex multi-tenant environment that balances national standardisation with deep personalisation and flexibility, ensuring high-quality teacher retention and improved student outcomes.

The Challenge: Complexity at National Scale

edt has been working with BuildEmpire on other learning initiatives for a number of years now, and when they saw the tender for the program with the DfE, they knew they faced a formidable task.

Having already created a programme like this for early career teachers (ECTs), the plan was to create something better following feedback, results and ongoing iterations of previous platforms and to focus on personalising the learning experience as much as possible by allowing mentors to log and manage their learners directly in the platform.

The challenge with this was being able to track all of the relevant data needed to share with DfE, and also to provide a sense of personalisation through statutory training in a way that gave the ECT ownership of their own progression. On top of that, they need a platform that would accommodate a wide range of users (known as delivery partners), from “power users” who had really detailed requirements to meet, as well as completely new delivery partners who would need a simple and user-friendly interface.

Giving mentors access to logging learner progress directly in the LMS was a key focus in order to support time-poor mentors complete their work, as well as engage in their own learning and development.

The solution required:

A Multi-Tiered Partner Model

Managing dozens of delivery partners, each requiring autonomy over their regional learners while edt maintained national oversight.

Statutory Compliance

Meeting strict DfE requirements for curriculum coverage while providing as personalised a learning experience as possible.

Beyond One-Size-Fits-All

Moving away from repetitive learning to a model that respects the prior experience of each teacher and offers learning to suit their expertise, skills, preferences.

Deep Technical Integration

Creating a seamless data pipeline between the DfE, Microsoft Dynamics, BI Analytics, the CRM, and the LMS to track granular engagement for government auditing.

The Solution: An Agile, Integrated Enterprise Ecosystem

With BuildEmpire, the edt team utilised the full Totara Suite to move beyond a standard LMS, creating a bespoke suite of learning that adapts to every user.

Prior to its creation, they engaged with their delivery partners via roundtables, discussions, forums, and brainstorming sessions to build out a keen idea of the learning design. The brief was clear, they wanted the platform to fit the programme, not the programme to fit the platform.

Key aspects of their platform involved:

1. Sophisticated Multi-Tenancy & Custom Reporting

Each delivery partner resides in their own tenant, providing isolated data security and regional control.

BuildEmpire developed bespoke reporting dashboards that allow mentors and regional admins to see actionable insights, such as learner pace and engagement, without needing a “degree in data science” to understand the numbers.

2. Personalised “Consolidate vs. Extend” Pathways

Regarding the mentor and ECT relationship, edt requested an option for a dual-pathway system within Perform. The mentor could choose to “consolidate” or “extend” the learning of their ECT on a module by module basis, allowing the learner to learn just what was needed, or to engage in further content.

This was really important as some ECTs will have learnt a lot of this content earlier in their learning journey, so for some, it was a case of enhancing their knowledge while for others it was a case of a reminder of the core concepts.

In order to aid this personalised learning, edt’s platform combined:

• Diagnostic-Led Learning: Mentors use a combination of knowledge quizzes and classroom observations (Practical Diagnostics) to determine the best path for each module.
• Dynamic Audience Management: Based on these diagnostics, Totara’s Dynamic Audiences automatically serve either “Consolidate” or “Extend” content, ensuring ECTs stay challenged but not overwhelmed. This automation was setup to be completely managed by Totara.

3. Integrated Performance & Instructional Coaching

The program features a unique Instructional Coaching cycle powered by Totara Perform.

Unlike competitors who use restrictive drop-down lists for action steps, BuildEmpire enabled open-field professional dialogue. This empowers mentors to co-create specific, agentic goals with their ECTs, directly linking performance conversations to the evidence-based learning on the platform.

4. High-Volume Data Orchestration

To meet DfE auditing standards, BuildEmpire built a custom API with edt’s CRM that captured incoming and outgoing webhooks to allow edt to create and manage users, as well as receive activity data on a granular level from viewing a resource to completing a quiz. All of this data was related from DfE through to the LMS, and back again.

To maintain platform performance during peak evening hours, the team implemented intelligent batching and queuing, ensuring a smooth user experience even during high-volume data moves.

Impact and Results

Unrivaled Flexibility

edt successfully “fitted the platform to the programme,” rather than compromising their learning design to fit a rigid system.

National Accountability

The robust data pipeline provides edt with the evidence needed for Ofsted inspections and DfE quality assurance.

Stronger Learner Engagement

By involving delivery partners in “ideation sessions” from the start, the platform achieved immediate buy-in and a high “maturity model” of usage.

Simplified Management of Diverse Learners and Delivery Partners

The extended enterprise options available in Totara have allowed edt to set a new standard for ECT training. Coordinating huge levels of content to a range of delivery partners was one challenge, but adding in another user on the LMS (the mentor) was another that has been overcome to great success.

Statutory Confidence

The system manages the complex lifecycle of teachers, including those on maternity leave or working part-time, ensuring no learner is left behind in their statutory induction period.