A helping hand for the SENCO in my life
Ian Summers, husband of a SENCO in Norfolk, describes how he developed SEN Diary to help his wife save time at work, thus enabling her to focus her attention on meeting the needs of pupils
Autumn 2001
When my wife began her role as SENCO at an infant school a few years ago she quickly realised that not only did she need to manage those who were on the Special Needs Register but also the many others about whom she and her colleagues were concerned. As every SENCO knows (even in a relatively small school), there is quite enough to do concerning those on the Register without adding any further work to what is already an impossible task. Undaunted, she devised a Microsoft Word document to be used to gather information about what she calls her Amber children – those not yet on Register but of concern. This quickly proved a difficult and awkward task – she had as many Amber children as there were children on the SEN Register.
Spring 2002
One day, frustrated and stressed, she said to me, “When you get a moment, do you think that you could make me a database to track all the SEN children and the Ambers?” Well, at the time I was very busy with an important project but was most intrigued – so I took a look at what was required and started. In fact, ideas conceived for each of the two projects (the important one for which I was being paid and her database) fed off each other – so both gained.
The SEN capability of the existing school database system was inflexible with its main failing that, in reality, only the school secretary was able to use it and would, when she had a few spare moments ask my wife to tell her what she wanted to enter into it. Annoyingly, every entry was stamped with the date when each entry was made, so no chronological sequence of events was possible without attending to it every day. Further, the only way to indicate that a pupil had left the school was to delete them – so no historical data was ever possible.
Of course, the source of the data for the school secretary was a large filing cabinet with a folder for each child – all my wife had to do when summoned by the school secretary was to route through the paper files and find all the most-recent information. Needless to say, these moments were when other, child-centred tasks were taking place, ie, thoroughly inconvenient and took far too long – the answer: a database that did all the hard work for her.
Easter 2002
The specification for the new database that met her initial requirements was thought through and, by Easter 2002, I’d knocked together a draft system and she started to enter the details of the children in her care.
Now, what could be done with the data? If constructed carefully, it’s amazing what you can do with the data in a database. Needless to say, her database fitted her requirements exactly and proved its worth very quickly. Once the basic details about each child had been entered, it was easy to add information to what was, in effect, a diary. Once we had begun to explore useful ways of extracting data the initial time spent entering the basic information was repaid many times over.
Summer 2003
In the intervening year, lots of new ideas and refinements took place as the amount of data grew.
Many other products have what might be called a ‘free-text’ diary, ie, not structured in any way and, therefore relatively useless as far as extracting useful reports. The secret to the success of her database is that each diary entry relates to a specific type of event (eg, IEP, telephone conversation, school support team meeting). It is, therefore, easy for the database to pick up every occurrence of, say, when the next IEP is due and report back with a ‘To-Do’ list. The diary has many columns each with a specific function, just like the diary entry type mentioned above – the next most important column is the ‘Done’ column. With this it is possible to indicate that an event has not yet taken place (unticked) and, when it has taken place, the ‘Done’ column is ticked and thus removed form the ‘To-Do’ list. What could be simpler?
January 2004
We both thought that there must be many other SENCOs out there tearing their hair out with the admin side of the job. With this in mind I began to turn a one-off application into a downloadable application that anyone could use. That shouldn’t be difficult, you may say, but it was an eye-opener to me how much needs to be done. Until I began to make it useable by anyone else, any problem was solved by me popping into my wife’s study and sorting it out there and then – any change was relatively easy to make (well, some took a lot longer than others). A published system needs to work without any requests for help! I went through everything and tested every feature until they all worked perfectly. I then made sure that they all worked together. I succeeded and set about building a web site to describe what it does and how it benefits SENCOs.
I had some help from another SENCO in a secondary school who tested it with her own data. She came up with some good ideas which made it more useful for secondary schools – these were incorporated before the product was published.
April 2004
Published at last as SEN Diary – a modicum of advertising and, later in the year, exposure at a local Special Needs Exhibition and the product was launched.
November 2004
I have always asked for feedback and I have had quite a lot – almost entirely positive. I’m very pleased about the amount of support that the product has required – very little indeed. My aim was to make it as intuitive as possible: one user said that it’s in your face (often a derogatory remark but, on this occasion, she meant that you can really see what you are doing – everything is in front of you).
My wife and I met the person who tested SEN Diary back in February 2004 – she asked if she could have another extra column for storing reading age – well actually, three extra columns, reading age, spelling age and CAT score. My response was to provide eighteen extra columns which users can use however they wish. In fact, all requests fed back to me by existing users were considered and built into version 2. I had originally hoped to publish version 2 in January 2005 but, like all good things, it took a lot longer to build than I had originally envisaged.
August 2005
Yes, ten months later, version 2 was complete and ready to be published. It has been warmly received by those who have taken the simple step of downloading it and installing it on top of the existing installation. In fact, like the rest of SEN Diary, installing and upgrading is simple – I’ve done all the hard work. But then, that’s how it should be.
October 2006
Version 2.6 published giving many new features including Import from other Systems, Transfer of data from another SEN Diary installation, and Creation and Management of IEPs.
June 2008
Version 2.8 published with improved Import from SIMS, and Interactive ‘To-Do’ Lists.
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Michael: a case study
Michael, a very vulnerable child who was having a troubled time at home, has shown little progress ever since his reception year. Now he is in year 2, the school feels that they are no longer able to provide for his special needs through normal school resources.
He was recorded in SEN Diary during his first term at the Amber stage (when there was concern but he had not yet been added to the SEN Register). Detailed notes of all discussions, incidents and liaisons with outside agencies have been recorded, and reminders to review IEP and detail the concerns to be discussed with others were noted in SEN Diary – a very simple process no different from keeping a diary.
When the case was being made for Statutory Assessment all my wife had to do for supporting evidence was print out the diary. This exemplifies the purpose of SEN Diary – to reduce the stress on SENCOs.
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