Lift College is a UK online college offering Ofqual-regulated qualifications for adults: functional skills, adult GCSEs and A Levels, health and social care, teaching and childcare. The public site at liftcollege.co.uk is a Next.js App Router site on Vercel, with Sanity Studio embedded in the same codebase.
Sanity holds the editorial side of the site: blog posts, career and study guides, faculty pages, FAQs, testimonials, press releases, a glossary and the curriculum pages that break each qualification into modules and lessons. Singletons for the homepage, site settings, promo schedule and course page defaults let the team change the site without a deploy.
Course records that the learning platform also needs live in Supabase, so the site reads from both. Qualification pages take their core course data from Supabase through a small adapter layer, then resolve FAQs, testimonials and related qualifications as Sanity references. Keeping one adapter in front of both sources means each page type has a single, testable place that decides where its content comes from.
One Studio customisation we rely on is a wrapped publish action for content freshness. On publish it compares the draft with the last published version and only moves the page’s ‘last updated’ date when the substance has actually changed, so a typo fix doesn’t make a guide look newly reviewed. That matters for qualification and funding information, which changes every year and which learners check before they enrol.
