The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) represents innovative pharmaceutical companies working in the bioscience industry in Britain. As well as supporting the sector the ABPI is on a mission to nurture the next generation of biologists and scientists by engaging with young people in schools all over the UK.

To help them achieve their ambition they asked us to design and build a website that would act as an eLearning platform with an extensive library of educational resources to support the primary and secondary school national curriculum. 

What we did

Since 2008 we’ve worked with the ABPI to build their education resources website into the extensive library of learning content used by 250,000 teachers that it is today. Over the last 8 years the site has seen an ongoing roadmap of improvements and incremental developments that keep it fresh and relevant. The current site is the third generation of website that we have designed and built for the ABPI.

The latest rebuild was perhaps the most significant step change in the history of the site as for the first time it is responsive to mobile devices. As well as updating and improving the user interface and overall user experience we also updated every one of the interactive resources. The site features over 300 pages of education resources and interactive content covering 42 different topics across Biology, Human Biology, Chemistry and Applied Sciences.

Built with the User in Mind

Designed for teachers and students, the site acts as an eLearning hub and a focal point for the ABPI’s engagement with schools. The extensive library of resources is created by teaching experts and approved by educational analysts so that it is closely matched to science topics in the primary and secondary school curriculums.

The main goal of the site has been to design and deliver content in a way that is engaging and fun for pupils and also invaluable for teachers and parents who have their own dedicated support areas. With this in mind, a lot of the original interactive content has been updated and recreated in HTML5 to make sure that it can be used on a wide variety of screen sizes from large format interactive whiteboards used by teachers down to tablet devices used by students.

For teachers there is a download library that allows them to download and keep all of the resources including supporting materials like worksheets and tasks.

Easy to manage

From a management point of view, the entire site can be easily managed by the ABPI admin team using the custom CMS that we built for them. One example of a tool within the CMS is a glossary management system that automatically links the first instance of every keyword on each page with the glossary section of the site. There is also a synonym and plural checker as part of this system that means that there aren’t too many duplicate words highlighted on the page.

Always evolving

The CMS and associated tools give the ABPI complete control over the site allowing them to update and add information as the curriculum changes or as new materials become available. We also continually work with the ABPI to design and develop new interactive resources for the site.

National recognition

The high quality of the eLearning resources has been recognised by both The Guardian and the National STEM centre who recommend the resources and feature them on their sites.