Making Shakespeare archive and other video/audio resources available to schools

The Educational Recording Agency (ERA) is a not-for-profit licensing organisation which allows licensees to use recordings of broadcast content for schools, colleges and universities.

ERA needed a new website to give educators access to a vast library of thousands of broadcast video and audio resources. It needed a fun, engaging website that was easy to use, fully responsive and that made it easy to find material relevant to the subject and level of study (school, college, university).

What we did

We ran workshops to understand the target audience, usability and content structure, to ensure that the website would suit the needs of all ERA’s users.

Based on this research, we built a custom, fully responsive WordPress website for ERA with a custom resource crawler to fill the new resource library with rich content.

The design was able to incorporate existing content to reduce the pressure on the ERA team to update the content after the migration. Once we had migrated the existing content, we optimised the layout to improve accessibility and user experience.

The result is a fully responsive and structured layout with flexible content blocks that makes every page unique.

Integrating the BBC Shakespeare Archives

More recently the BBC partnered with ERA to transfer up its existing Shakespeare Archive. The Archive was redesigned and integrated into the ERA website and then extended to include more recent productions. These amazing BBC TV and radio productions are now available to educators and students on the streamlined, searchable ERA platform.

Natural Curriculum – an award-winning educational resource

As an additional project, we built the Natural Curriculum website for ERA, which has won a number of awards including two Education Resources Awards – for ‘Free educational resources’ and ‘Primary resource or equipment – ICT’ and a 4* Teach Primary Award for free resources.

Updated June 2025

Improved membership platform, increase in new monthly users and ongoing impact since BrightMinded development.

It has been a few years since we began working with ERA so, on top of ongoing communications, we decided to check in and catch up on how our collaboration is affecting ERA and its members. The results speak for themselves… 

Results of an improved platform: ensuring a steady user growth…

Since the platform’s launch in September 2020, ERA’s membership has grown steadily and now stands at an impressive 35,500 users. 

The reach within the education sector is notable, with 88% of state secondary schools, 93% of universities, and 72% of colleges across the UK having at least one active ERA account.

Monthly growth remains strong, with around 2,400 new users joining every month. 

Our work on streamlining the user verification process has also paid off, significantly reducing the time spent on manual checks and allowing the ERA team to focus on more strategic priorities while new users flock in without disruptions. 

Improved user metrics with a digital transformation 

A major technical upgrade has been the implementation of Single Sign-On (SSO) between ERA and Natural Curriculum’s websites. This integration has contributed to a remarkable 244% increase in primary education users over the previous year and helped capture vital marketing data to better engage with this audience.

From this data it is possible for the ERA team to see the engagement being on the rise. 

Between January and April 2025, 32% of ERA’s users, approximately 11,300 people, actively watched or shared at least one video, demonstrating the platform’s value as a resource for teachers and educators alike.

These insights highlight the positive impact of combining smart technology with sector knowledge and ongoing collaboration. We’re proud to support ERA’s mission to provide accessible, high-quality audio-visual content to educators across the UK and look forward to continuing this journey together.