Thorn Learning designed and developed the central content-planning system used by the British Council’s TeachingEnglish team, bringing together website content, webinars, publications, social media campaigns and professional development activities within a single collaborative planning framework.
Project overview
TeachingEnglish publishes a wide range of content across its website, social media channels, webinars, podcasts, publications, courses and events. As the programme expanded, the British Council required a more efficient way to coordinate content development, publication schedules and promotional activity across multiple teams and stakeholders.
Thorn Learning was commissioned to design and build a content-planning solution that would provide both strategic oversight and detailed operational planning. The resulting system enabled TeachingEnglish teams, consultants and wider British Council colleagues to access up-to-date information on upcoming activities, content publication schedules and work-in-progress across the programme.
The planner became the foundation for a range of subsequent project management and content-tracking systems used across TeachingEnglish workstreams, including open courses, learner guidance resources, videos, social media campaigns and community initiatives.
How we worked with the client
Chris Thorn worked closely with TeachingEnglish content, marketing, social media and open learning teams to analyse existing processes, identify pain points and develop a more streamlined planning system.
The project involved:
- Analysing existing planning and reporting systems.
- Consulting stakeholders across TeachingEnglish workstreams.
- Designing spreadsheet-based planning and tracking tools.
- Developing internal and external planning interfaces.
- Creating workflow and approval-tracking processes.
- Designing content categorisation systems.
- Building reporting and filtering functionality.
- Supporting implementation and user testing.
- Refining the planner based on team feedback.
The final solution balanced strategic visibility with operational detail, allowing different stakeholders to access the information most relevant to their roles while maintaining a single source of truth for programme planning.
Services and standards
Content operations, workflow design, spreadsheet development, project management systems, reporting, stakeholder consultation and process improvement.
Development of collaborative planning systems designed to support geographically dispersed teams working across multiple content streams and publication schedules.
Main outputs
- Content calendar for wider British Council stakeholders.
- Content planner for TeachingEnglish teams and suppliers.
- Monthly and weekly workflow views.
- Gantt-style production tracking.
- Content approval and quality-assurance workflows.
- Content status tracking from production through publication. [
- Multi-platform content scheduling across Facebook, Instagram, X and YouTube.
- Evergreen content tracking.
- Hashtag management systems.
- Resource ownership and responsibility tracking.
- Team collaboration and review workflows.
Learn more
The content calendar supports the wider TeachingEnglish programme.
Team and contributors
- Content planner design, workflow development and implementation: Chris Thorn
