25 September 2025
Tower Hamlets
Boosting local authority compliance and e-learner’s engagement
Helping the London Borough of Tower Hamlets push boundaries with a flexible learning management system from Synergy Learning.
Tower Hamlets London Borough Council employs more than 5,000 people to provide key services to around 310,000 people living in the borough.
In common with all local authority learning and development programmes, it needs to deliver a diverse range of learning to employees in a wide variety of different roles and specialisms. As recently as 2017, it was balancing these complex learning management requirements using spreadsheets.
We were tasked with creating a learning management system that would:
- ✅ Give Tower Hamlets greater flexibility within its L&D programme
- ✅ Be future-proofed for upgrades and improvements
- ✅ Play a key role in operational development, as well as L&D
- ✅ Increase engagement and accessibility among its workforce
A local authority learning and development platform with strategic impact
We worked with Tower Hamlets to create the Learning Hub, its new Totara LMS designed to open up learning opportunities throughout the organisation and drive sign-ups to courses.
The local authority chose configuration over customisation. It has relied on Totara’s core features and settings — and its incredible flexibility — to achieve the required outcomes without bespoke development. This was a strategic decision made to enable straightforward LMS upgrades and early adoption of new Totara features.
Tower Hamlets now has around 350 training events and courses advertised to employees on the Learning Hub at any time. These are presented as event listings as well as in a course catalogue with filters for different departments and topics.
While Tower Hamlets’ L&D admin team oversees day-to-day LMS operations, responsibility for managing individual courses and events is delegated to course leaders in each department. This ensures course-related queries with the potential to overwhelm the council LMS team’s resources are answered by subject matter experts. This frees up vital admin time for the L&D team.
But the Learning Hub also ventures from the realms of L&D and into operational development. Harnessing Totara’s renowned flexibility and versatility, the council uses its LMS to deliver and manage various strategic initiatives.
Its onboarding journeys, mandatory learning programmes, change management processes, strategic planning, Investors in People accreditation framework and IT migration schemes are just a handful of ways in which key organisational priorities are overseen using the LMS.
Even Totara’s learning plans — a feature usually used to monitor individual progress towards key competencies — have been repurposed to track Tower Hamlets’ key strategic objectives.
Employee performance is monitored via the council’s Annual Review process — an important compliance process for everyone in the organisation. This is now delivered via the Learning Hub. Totara’s usability and responsive design across all devices have made it easier for employees to engage with the review. Indeed, introducing a mobile-ready LMS has increased learning engagement across the board among frontline employees who may not have access to a laptop in their role.
Totara’s powerful reporting system creates detailed, impactful graphic reports to show managers which individuals and teams have not completed this mandatory task. This has proved invaluable in driving engagement with the process.
Compliance rates up to 90% from 40%
Improved user experiences, greater accessibility and targeted use of Totara reports have seen Tower Hamlet’s compliance rates jump from 40% to 90% in some areas.
By developing a flexible LMS and delegating some responsibilities to course organisers, the council has significantly reduced the amount of admin time needed to manage sign-ups and enrolments. This saves costs by giving everyone across the organisation the opportunity to host L&D events.
But the council is not resting on its laurels. It sees potential to continue pushing boundaries and putting Totara’s limitless customisation to the test to achieve its L&D targets and wider organisational goals.
Moynul Islam
Learning, Organisational and Cultural Development Technical Practitioner
