Rebuilding Ark Curriculum Plus's subject excellence platform on Totara

Ark Curriculum Plus (AC+), part of Ark, one of the UK’s largest education charities. AC+ runs subject excellence programmes (Mastery curricula for both Primary and Secondary phases across English, Maths, Science and Geography) used by thousands of teachers in hundreds of schools and Multi-Academy Trusts.

The Challenge

AC+ had outgrown the legacy LMS hosting MyMastery. The platform couldn’t keep up with the scale, complexity, and pace at which AC+ was developing programmes. Specifically:

• A 10,000+ resource library that had become unmanageable. Content management tooling was too limited for the scale AC+ operates at. Video content lived in a proprietary “”playlists”” feature that bypassed the resource library entirely and carried no metadata. Tags across the rest of the library were free text with no validation, so the same tag existed as multiple variants – different spacing, typos, inconsistent naming. Cleaning the library in-place wasn’t viable.
• A Salesforce integration that needed an upgrade. School membership, programme entitlements and tier data live in Salesforce, managed via a third-party integration partner. The connection between Salesforce and the LMS had been a hard road to build and was fragile — making reporting on teacher engagement by programme, tier or key stage slower and more manual than it should have been.

• Confusing user management for school admins. School-based administrators (Mastery Leads) did have the ability to add, remove and reset their teachers, but the UX for doing so was confusing enough that they routinely contacted AC+ support to resolve basic tasks. At AC+’s scale, this was a significant operational drag.
• No clean way to model the different access levels AC+ actually needed. 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, simpler and frankly more delightful. The overarching goal across every workstream was to make it easier for users to find what they needed at the point of need — whether that was adding a teacher, finding a recently viewed resource, or booking onto a live Zoom training. The new platform had to be simple, thoroughly user-tested, and flexible enough to deliver tailored views to different audiences in support of that goal.

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

• 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.
• Wrote a full custom migration script to pull every legacy resource (including the orphaned video content) into the new CMS with clean, structured metadata.
• Leveraged LibreLambda so users can preview every uploaded file (pptx, xlsx, docx, etc., rendered to PDF) before downloading — 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 — no manual enrolment work.

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.
• Implemented clean role separation between Mastery Leads, Development Leads and Associate Development Leads, each with the right scope of access and reporting visibility.

Integration with the wider AC+ stack

The result

• A successful migration of an organisation-critical platform with minimal disruption. This was a substantial systems and digital change for AC+ and their customers, and large platform migrations typically come with real operational pain. In practice, customer support queries returned to their normal daily baseline within just two weeks of go-live.
• Quantitatively validated user satisfaction. In AC+’s annual customer survey (hundreds of responses), 70% of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with the move to the new MyMastery platform, 25% were neutral— which for a platform migration of this scale we treat as a win, since it means the change went under their radar and didn’t disrupt their day-to-day.

• Strong qualitative feedback captured throughout user research, iterative testing and post-launch.
• Commercially healthy. Year-to-date renewals and new sales are tracking pleasingly well — early signs, but the platform is supporting rather than impeding commercial momentum.
• Now expanding to new use cases. In June, AC+ is bringing Ark Teacher Training onto the same platform — teacher mentors, ATT leads and trainee teachers — a clear vote of confidence in the foundation that’s been built, and an exciting set of new extended enterprise audiences joining MyMastery.
• Ongoing iteration. AC+ and Accipio continue developing new functionality and blocks together post-launch, treating the platform as a living product rather than a delivered project.