By Farshad Dashti, Principal Software Engineer at Nimble Approach
Public sector teams are under constant pressure to deliver more services, faster, without increasing cost or complexity. For the Department for Education (DFE), that often meant the same cycle repeating itself: a new policy requirement, a new form-heavy service, and another bespoke build that took months to deliver while locking valuable functionality into a single product.
To help solve that challenge, Nimble worked with Department for Education officials in a blended team to create FlexForms. What began as a more cost-effective way to build digital forms and services evolved into FlexForms: a multi-tenant SaaS platform that enables multiple DfE services to share the same product while tailoring it to their own needs.
The Challenge DfE Faced
DfE needed a way to stand up comprehensive, GOV.UK-aligned application forms without commissioning a full custom build every time. Traditional delivery meant long lead times, repeated engineering effort, and platforms that were hard to reuse across teams.
The opportunity was clear. If forms and journeys could be defined once as configuration, rather than rebuilt as code for each service, DfE could:
- Reduce the cost of launching new services
- Shorten delivery from months to days for standard journeys
- Maintain a consistent user experience across products
- Free developers to focus on the problems that truly need custom engineering
That was the brief Nimble set out to meet.
The Solution Nimble Provided
Our journey began with the External Applications Team: Forms Engine. The core idea was simple: define an entire application journey in a JSON template, including tasks, pages, fields, validation and conditional logic. FlexForms interprets that template to generate a complete GOV.UK-style application, removing the need to build each journey in code and significantly reducing development effort.
As adoption grew, the Forms Engine evolved into a multi-tenant platform capable of supporting multiple services. That foundation became FlexForms, a SaaS product designed for reuse across DfE.
Today, FlexForms gives DfE:
- One shared platform, many services: A multi-tenant foundation where tenant resolution, configuration, authentication, templates, and data remain cleanly separated.
- A template-driven forms engine: Version-controlled JSON schemas that power live applications, supported by administration tools for managing templates and releases.
- Enterprise-grade foundations: Built with DfE Sign-In (DfEs authentication for external stakeholders to all their services) and Entra SSO for internal DfE users, tenant-scoped security, secure file handling, notifications, messaging, audit trails, and caching.
- Reusable contracts and clients: Standardised interfaces that allow new consumers to integrate with the platform quickly, without rebuilding the underlying capabilities.
In practice, this means new services can be introduced through configuration and templates rather than by building another standalone product from scratch. What once required months of bespoke development can now, for standard journeys, be set up in days once the platform is in place.
How FlexForms Works
Users access a FlexForms service through the web front end, where the platform first identifies the relevant tenant from the hostname. They then authenticate through the identity provider configured for that tenant. Behind the scenes, FlexForms converts that identity into a tenant-scoped API token and applies the appropriate roles and permissions, ensuring each service remains securely isolated from the others.
Administrators shape services through templates rather than code. They can select a template, choose a version, view or edit the underlying JSON schema, and create new versions from existing ones as journeys evolve. At runtime, the forms engine handles the rest.
The Results
FlexForms is already delivering the outcomes DfE asked for, and the kind of platform story that Nimble is proud to own:
- Lower cost to serve: Reduce repeated bespoke development for form-heavy services by building on shared platform capabilities.
- Faster time to service: Launch new services from reusable templates instead of starting each journey from scratch.
- Reuse at scale: Support multiple DfE products through a single SaaS platform with shared, reusable capabilities.
- Safer multi-tenancy: Maintain clear separation between tenant configuration, authentication and data, with robust administrative boundaries.
- A foundation for growth: Provide DfE with the template versioning, administration tooling and enterprise-grade platform needed to support future services and new delivery patterns.
This is more than a technical upgrade. It represents reusable digital infrastructure: a forms platform that helps DfE reduce time and cost across services, while demonstrating Nimble’s ability to own and deliver a real product end to end for a major government department.
The Next Chapter for FlexForms
FlexForms continues to evolve, with more journey patterns and platform capabilities still to come. The next stage of that evolution is exploring how AI can make building and configuring digital services even simpler, helping teams create forms and journeys faster while maintaining the consistency, security, and governance provided by the platform.
The direction is unchanged: keep the cost of new services low while maintaining the quality, security and governance needed to support future digital services.
If you want to explore how a platform approach like FlexForms could reduce delivery cost and complexity in your organisation, we’d love to talk.
