Project · Learner Management System

Built for South Cumbria Skills Exchange — operating publicly as Whamos Training and Development CIC — a community interest company delivering funded and commercial training across South Cumbria. The system replaced paper registers, emailed assignments and spreadsheet-based grant tracking with a unified, regulatory-compliant platform.

The architecture

The LMS runs as a custom WordPress plugin. The backend is a PHP REST API exposing thirty-one controllers — learners, tutors, courses, sessions, attendance, assignments, grants, invoices, audit logs, ILR fields, user roles, and more. The frontend is four separate React applications, each a different dashboard, each consuming the same API.

Behind the API sit nineteen custom database tables. Learners, courses, sessions, attendance, assignments, feedback, grants, invoices, audit log entries, role assignments. Every table has a migration file, every migration is versioned, every schema change is reproducible. The complete codebase is owned outright by the South Cumbria Skills Exchange — no SaaS subscription, no vendor lock-in, no third-party data exposure.

The methodology

The build used a layered methodology documented in detail in the book 'Building Without Code'. The core elements: a 2,000-line Project File acting as Wilson's (GitHub Copilot's) external memory; sandwich prompts pairing Team Brief, Task, and Restraints; milestone-based journals with file-level change tracking; and a strict separation between architectural thinking (done with Claude) and code execution (done with Wilson).

The result was 277 documented milestones across 23 calendar days. Every milestone has a journal entry recording what was done, which files changed, what was tested, what the commit hash was, and what the deployment commands were. The audit trail was not added retrospectively — it was the methodology itself.

Compliance built in, not bolted on

Grant-funded education is one of the most record-intensive industries in the UK. A missed attendance entry or an unrecorded ILR field can mean the difference between claiming a full course fee and being asked to repay it. We designed the LMS with that reality in mind from the first prompt.

Every API endpoint has three checks: authentication, capability and scope. No user PII ever appears in logs, errors, console output or sync payloads. Every data write creates an audit log entry — automatically, at the model layer, not relying on developer discipline at the route layer. ILR fields are validated at the database level, not just in the UI. Guardian access is scoped strictly to the learners they are linked to, with the rule enforced at every query. DfE and Ofsted audits became a matter of running a report, not a matter of panic.

The timeline

Day 1, 9th February 2026: a planning day with Claude, producing the 2,000-line Project File. Day 2: Wilson opened the repository and began the first milestone. By day 4 the core data layer was in place. By day 10 the Admin dashboard handled real users. By day 18 all four dashboards were live and the legacy data inclusion work began. By day 23 the system was in production use at the South Cumbria Skills Exchange.

That timeline is not optimistic. It is documented. Every milestone has a journal entry with a commit hash. Anyone could verify it from the repository history alone. Against the traditional estimate of four to six months, the project ran for the same duration again after the planned milestones to add features that emerged from real use — scope additions worth more than the base specification.

The cost breakdown

What this proves

AI subscriptions during the build period: roughly £250. VPS hosting amortised over the build: £10. Total hard costs: approximately £260.

Eighteen working days, averaging sixteen hours per day: 288 hours of human time. Valued at a senior developer's day rate of £450, that puts the human-time value at £8,100 — a total project cost of around £8,360. Compare that to the traditional estimate: a development team of two to four engineers over four to six months, conservatively £97,500 to £137,500.

Even at the high estimate of human time, the project came in at six percent of the conventional cost. The work happened in front of the TV, in steady ten-to-fifteen-minute Wilson sessions with prompts written in advance. Not in a state of deep concentration for sixteen hours, but in steady, low-level engagement punctuated by bursts of focused prompt-writing.

The LMS is not a one-off. It is the most visible demonstration of how we work. Holiday Home Booking, Motorhome Booking, Way Out West Mountain Adventures, TP Food, and TP Event Management are all built with the same methodology. Each is a real system in production with real customers, real money changing hands, and real day-to-day operational dependence.

The principle is simple. If your business needs software that genuinely fits, we can build it in weeks rather than months, at a fraction of conventional cost, with the engineering discipline of a senior team. Fixed price after a discovery call. Full code ownership on delivery. No SaaS lock-in. The Learner Management System was the proof. Your project would be the next one.

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