Case Study: TeachFirst

Helping Teach First teach more: building a fast, reliable education platform

Teach First is a UK-based charity that recruits top graduates into on-the-job teacher training in schools in disadvantaged communities – helping to give children from all backgrounds the brilliant teachers they need. They’ve appointed more than 10,000 teachers in low-income areas, supporting more than one million underprivileged children.

The challenge: increasing the speed and capacity of the Teach First platform

We’ve worked with Teach First for more than a decade. They first approached us to improve the performance of the website, and we’ve gone on to build a custom platform for their entire CRM and training needs. Their core challenge? Making sure their site could handle 20k users at all times – all trying to achieve slightly different goals. 

The must haves: Teach First wanted to continue working with Drupal, and they wanted a software partner who could work like an extension of their internal team.

Results: Processing 40K users in a matter of hours 

It used to take Teach First between 3-4 days to process 200K Salesforce updates. We reduced that time to a few hours. And while the site used to struggle with 10k active users, we boosted the capacity to 40k users – serving each one of them with a smooth web experience. It’s dramatically improved Teach First’s processes, making it easier, smoother and faster than ever before to enroll and learn on their platform. 

How we got those results: 

Drupal experience

We have extensive previous experience working with Drupal, so we were aware of some of the common pitfalls. We developed a dynamic platform able to accommodate any new role, content or changes. And with up to 15 roles, there was a complex map of user needs, states and goals to navigate.

Faster processing speeds

Our team connected Drupal and Salesforce to deliver faster project processing, and remove unnecessary steps on the way. This resulted in quadrupling the amount of users able to use the platform at one time. 

A decade of collaboration

We are still providing solutions for new Teach First programs, designing for the complex tasks to help their platform run ever-more smoothly as it grows. We’ve worked together for more than ten years – as a software partner that can grow and adapt as the business changes.

The tech we used:

• Drupal – Teach First’s original CMS, and the one they wanted to continue using. 
• Salesforce – as a full CRM solution for recruiting and managing teachers. 
• .NET used to provide small solutions for certain projects, like applying for a new school year
• TWIG, CSS, JavaScript used to create custom themes on the platform.

For more information about this or any other project, please feel free to contact us.