The social work induction programme (SWIP) is a two-year programme requiring newly qualified social workers to demonstrate their skills and knowledge with evidence from their practice. At the end of the programme, social workers are assessed against the new post qualifying standards. By improving the quality and consistency of early career development and assessment, we aim to improve the quality of social work practice, leading to better outcomes for the children and families we serve.
On the SWIP digital team, we’re designing a digital service that will support the delivery of this programme. Through our service, social workers will be able to access learning resources, submit assessments, receive feedback and track their progress towards the standards.
Choosing a learning management system
We initially explored the option of building a new custom platform to deliver the programme. While this would offer us the highest degree of design freedom, it became clear that lots of existing learning management systems (LMS) on the market already provided the features that we need for the SWIP digital service. Using an existing learning management system means that we can deliver the service quicker and more cost-effectively.
Based on our research into existing systems, Moodle emerged as the most suitable platform for our needs. It is one of the most widely adopted learning management systems across education, business, and government sectors.
One of Moodle’s key advantages is that it’s open source, offering the flexibility to tailor both its functionality and appearance to our specific needs while being more cost-effective than building a custom system from scratch. We can fully customise its appearance to be compatible with the GOV.UK Design System and adapt its functionality to meet the needs of our service users.
Another key advantage of Moodle is its strong compliance with security and data privacy standards, ensuring that user information remains protected. It can also support large-scale deployments and handle high volumes of user traffic with some public sector sites hosting more than 500,000 users.
Use across UK government
Moodle is available through the G-Cloud 14 Digital Marketplace, making it a pre-approved solution for UK government bodies. It’s already used by several government departments and agencies, including the Ministry of Justice, Department for Business and Trade, Health Security Agency and the NHS.
Moodle sites are used across the public sector to deliver:
- compliance training and tracking
- employee onboarding and skill development
- career development and advancement
- HR and workplace safety training
- competency-based training and management
Because of Moodle’s widespread use in a variety of services across government, we’re confident that we can adapt it to meet our needs and to comply with Government Digital Services (GDS) standards.
Implementing Moodle: our process
We integrated Moodle with our bespoke account management system, allowing us to separate users by organisation within a single site, improving efficiency and reducing costs.
We also explored integration with GOV.UK services, including a proof of concept for single sign-on using GOV.UK One Login. To ensure a consistent user experience, we began developing a custom Moodle theme aligned with GDS design and accessibility standards.
Theming Moodle for GDS
Moodle supports a range of plug-ins, including custom themes. We created a custom GOV.UK theme that can be installed and selected on Moodle, ensuring visual consistency with the GOV.UK Design System.
This is made possible through the govuk-frontend package which is maintained by the GOV.UK team. When the team adds new features, makes changes or fixes bugs, we can update our code using the latest version.
Moodle utilises a range of components and we're progressively theming many of them, such as headers, footers, and buttons,so the platform increasingly mirrors the look and feel of a GOV.UK service.
Before
The default homepage before the GOV.UK theme has been applied
After
A recognisable GOV.UK design after applying the theme
Contribute to our work
Theming Moodle for GDS will be an ongoing process as we determine which areas of Moodle we will use to deliver the features our users need. One of our goals is to share the work we’ve done on the Moodle GOV.UK theme so that other projects within DfE and wider government can use it and contribute to it.
The govuk-moodle-theme repository can be found on GitHub, under the dfe-digital organisation. It is a public, open-source repository, so anyone can reference our theme’s releases in their project to apply the theme to their instance of Moodle and even choose to build on top of it.
We’re inviting any teams who are interested in using Moodle for their services to contribute to this work and help us to expand the repository.
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