Accipio + Bradford College with BeReady: Apprenticeship Delivery
Bradford College is a further and higher education college in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, with approximately 25,000 students. BeReady is a learning and development organisation that specialises in delivering funded online training to schools and colleges across the UK.
The Challenge
A third of UK teachers leave the profession within 5 years. What’s more, the Covid pandemic cause a reduction in the number of newly qualified teachers entering the profession. The pandemic exacerbated the existing barriers for gaining this qualification, such as finances, time and course location. It left many training providers unable to deliver classes and much of the population unwilling or unable to interact with those outside of their Covid bubbles.
BeReady partnered with Bradford College, a leading teacher training provider, to create a solution that would help their school partners across the country to continue to bring in new teachers and reduce the impact of those leaving the profession. Bradford College already delivered apprenticeships, but these were only face-to-face, which meant they could only be delivered to local students at significant cost and using outdated systems.
What we did
BeReady and Bradford college elected to work with us at Accipio—a Totara Platinum Alliance Partner—to rapidly deploy a new Totara learning platform. This leveraged BeReady’s and Accipio’s existing platform expertise, negating the need to go through a risky and arduous procurement and implementation process.
The platform has both digital learning and an integrated ePortfolio system to manage apprenticeship delivery, removing the need for two separate platforms. The partnership called upon BeReady’s digital production expertise, taking traditional classroom learning assets and enriching them through animation and design.
Apprenticeship delivery is complex and heavily regulated with oversight from Ofsted and the ESFA. The platform ensures that the programme is fully compliant with the rigorous requirements of both the schools inspectorate and the Apprenticeship Levy, the funding agency.
The platform enables learners and mentors to access content, post results, interact with lecturers and peers, and log all activities and coursework. Totara’s flexibility provides a bespoke journey for all the different types of users, giving different access and user experience whilst ensure that interaction between them is seamless. The relative small amount of required user support enables the team to spend more time building content and delivering additional value to the learners.
The results
This project has been exceptionally successful and is expected to continue to grow over the coming year. It has delivered a sustainable career pathway for teaching assistants to become teachers. Funded by the Apprenticeship Levy, it has reduced financial pressure on schools at a time when budgets are ever overstretched.
Key results include:
- Rapid deployment. This fully digital solution was created using Totara in fewer than 6 weeks. This includes everything required to deliver an apprenticeship standing, including content, learning journeys and Ofsted/ESFA compliance.
- Transformation of their apprenticeship delivery. Together, we have overhauled Bradford College’s approach to delivering apprenticeships, creating a single platform to replace the previous clunky, file-based systems. It seamlessly delivers both online learning and the ePortfolio requirements to manage end-to-end process.
- Cost savings. Compared with delivering face-to-face training, the platform provides significant cost savings. We estimate this to be over £100,000 per annum (including travel costs, consolidating platforms and delivery methods, automation for compliance tracking and administration etc).
- Access to a new market and income generation. Without the platform, Bradford College could only deliver to local students. The platform has enabled them to recruit nationally, substantially increasing their talent pool.
- High completion rates. Hundreds of aspiring teachers from across the UK are enrolled onto a programme and completion rates are on track to be over 95%. The first graduates have emerged to take their positions as fully qualified teachers.
- Achieving career goals during Covid. This fully digital solution ensured that those amazing teaching assistants whose career goals were disrupted by the pandemic are now able to inspire the next generation as fully qualified teachers. The flexibility that the platform provides delivered a solution not only to the unprecedented Covid challenge, but also to the childcare and travel challenges that others were previously unable to overcome.