The Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, has published The Children’s Plan. Its findings and recommendations are drawn from the largest-ever survey of schools and colleges in England. The survey aimed to understand the challenges children bring into school, how schools support them, and what more is needed to ensure every child can thrive. It’s possible to substitute ‘thrive’ for ‘flourish’ - the theme of the 2025 Annual Conference.
The plan includes seven recommendations to enable schools to meet the needs of all learners so they “attend, engage, attain” and, yes, flourish. The recommendations currently exist only as proposals in the report. They are some distance from becoming obligations for trusts and their schools. In fact, many are intended to reduce the burden on existing school resources. The recommendations, backed by suitable infrastructure, should improve outcomes by improving the knowledge of individual children’s circumstances and setting up the right support.
Centralising access to relevant data
From an education technology perspective, I believe that the most eye-catching element of the recommendations is the call for a coordinated digital record of each child. This would be based on the single unique identifier to be introduced in the planned Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. This unique ID would allow essential data and information about each child to be collected and accessed by multiple agencies to make the ‘whole child’ visible in a central portal.
The single portal forms part of the recommendation for “a new focus on a broader range of additional needs for those who need support inside and outside the classroom”.
Another recommendation is to change the approach to SEND support, currently based on Education, Health, and Care Plans (EHCPs). This too has technology implications. It proposes the establishment of a digital platform to record a child’s needs, their support entitlement and the progress they make. The platform would be accessible to multiple stakeholders, including parents/carers, and act as a shared management information system.
The plan’s sixth recommendation focuses on the role of special schools and alternative provision. It calls for the default situation to be for all children to receive their education in a mainstream school. This will require inclusivity by design to help those with SEND and those without. Here, technology can be an enabler. The DfE’s recent consultation on “Narrowing the digital divide in schools and colleges” gave several examples of how built-in accessibility tools can help. One school trust described its project to systematically evaluate the educational technologies that impact SEND students most.
The census, which generated these recommendations, unsurprisingly showed that schools and trusts already support their learners with a wide range of needs. However, they often lack contextual information from other agencies about a child, such as their housing status or relevant health information. Greater visibility through easily accessible shared data should help schools deliver appropriate support more effectively or make referrals to other services.
Technology implications
The plan’s recommendations are still in the if-not-when implementation stage. However, they underline that future developments will only make reliable connectivity, networking and staff devices more critical. If every child has a digital record of their circumstances, accessing it to make informed decisions will be crucial.
Strong cyber security would be an essential part of any implementation. Schools and trusts already hold considerable amounts of sensitive data. A central system holding data about children would be a target for cyber criminals. Good cyber security practices, especially by staff, would become even more important than they are already.
Not all the recommendations have direct implications for schools, but overall they should provide encouragement for trusts to continue to invest in connectivity, devices, staff training and cyber security. The DfE’s digital and technology standards provide a good starting point for school trusts.
The recommendations could prompt trusts to establish greater central pastoral expertise and capacity. This would help embed good practice about using the newly available data and the portal across a trust’s schools.
- RM Technology is a CST platinum partner, and sponsor the networking drinks reception at the CST Annual Conference 2025.
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