Lakes College is a community college that has served West Cumbria for more than 20 years, delivering further and higher education across a broad range of technical and vocational programmes. Based in Workington, the college works with more than 700 employer partners to align its programmes with Cumbria's workforce needs, and apprenticeships are a central part of that offer.
Rated Good by Ofsted at its most recent inspection, Lakes College delivers apprenticeships across a wide range of subject areas, from engineering and construction to health and social care. Its courses run from Level 1 through to degree-level study at Level 6.
As Lakes College's apprenticeship provision grew, the limitations of its existing setup became harder to work around. The college was running a bespoke platform alongside Learning Assist, a combination that created friction in day-to-day delivery and limited the team's ability to scale with confidence.
At the same time, the college was planning to take on a further cohort of apprentices from a local private provider, who was an existing Bud customer. That transfer added urgency to finding a platform that could handle both the existing provision and the incoming learners within a single, joined-up environment.
Lakes College needed a platform that could truly enable growth, not just accommodate it.
Lakes College selected Bud to replace its legacy setup with a single, scalable foundation for apprenticeship delivery. It wanted one platform that could bring its existing provision and incoming learners from the local private provider together, and support continued growth from there.
Why Lakes chose Bud:
One platform instead of multiple: it replaced the bespoke systems and Learning Assist combination that was creating friction in day-to-day delivery.
Enrolment built for growth: a more streamlined, proactive enrolment process as provision expands.
Ready for incoming cohorts: it could bring learners transferring from other providers onto the same platform as existing provision.
The full journey in one place: applications, programme design and configuration, learning delivery, and migration of historic learner data.
Bud and Lakes College planned a phased implementation from the outset, aligning processes, agreeing scope, and preparing for the proposed learner transfer from the local private provider. The implementation covered the core capabilities the college needed to run its provision effectively:
Managing applications
Designing and configuring programmes
Supporting learning delivery
Lakes College welcomed its first learner onto Bud in September 2024, less than three months after implementation kicked off in July 2024. The implementation project was complete by October 2024.
As Lakes College’s adoption of Bud progressed, the support continued alongside it, from training and learning-delivery guidance to regular reviews. In early 2026, the college took this a step further, upgrading from Premium to Enterprise with a three-year subscription. This included a six-month implementation and onboarding package, bringing together train-the-trainer sessions, programme review, project management and consultancy. Training is being delivered in person and is ongoing.
As part of the Enterprise package, Lakes College agreed a legacy migration project to consolidate learner data from its previous systems into Bud, covering active learners, as well as completed, withdrawn, and break-in-learning cohorts. The migration was delivered as a controlled, phased process. With it complete in June 2026, Lakes College had moved from a fragmented, multi-system environment to a single platform supporting its full apprenticeship provision.
For further education colleges managing apprenticeship provision at scale, the technology that underpins delivery matters a great deal. Fragmented systems create friction at every stage, from enrolment through to compliance and reporting, and that friction compounds as provision grows.
Lakes College’s experience shows what getting the foundations right looks like: a controlled migration away from legacy systems, a team that’s being trained and supported, and a platform that can grow alongside the provision it supports.
With a three-year Enterprise commitment in place and early signs of faster enrolment, the college is well positioned for what comes next, and we’ll be following its progress as the results come in.