At the end of last month, I sat on a panel alongside Marc Robinson of VenturEd Solutions and Rick Gardner of CPOMS, in front of more than twenty multi-academy trust leaders and safeguarding leads. The session was billed as a peer review of a new Safeguarding, Health and Wellbeing Framework that our three organisations have built together, not as a pitch.
I left convinced of two things: that the people running our schools are working extraordinarily hard for the children who depend on them, and that the systems around them are making that work far harder than it should be.
When we opened the floor, the same themes came up again and again. Trust leaders told us they feel left on their own. They described a relationship with their local authority that too often feels like one of distance rather than partnership, with communication and support that does not match the scale of what they are being asked to deliver. They are trying to do as good a job as they possibly can, and they are doing it largely unaided.
The second theme was interoperability, although that is a clinical word for a very human problem. Information that already exists about a child (a diagnosis, a care plan, a record of the specialist support they receive in school or externally) frequently fails to reach the people who need it. A GP holds one part of the picture; a social worker holds another; the school holds a third. For a child with special educational needs, where the support has often already been carefully assessed and documented, this fragmentation is not an inconvenience. It is the difference between a child being understood and a child being missed.
This is the gap we set out to close.
The evidence is blunt. Where safeguarding, health and behaviour records sit in disconnected tools, SEND pupils are the first to fall through the gaps. The signals that tell us a child is struggling rarely arrive as a single, obvious event. They arrive as patterns: a missed dose of medication, a change in behaviour, a new disclosure, a drop in attendance. Seen separately, in three different systems owned by three different teams, those signals mean very little. Seen together, they tell a story, and that story is what allows staff to step in early.
A paper file can be every bit as siloed as a digital one. The format is not the problem; the disconnection is.
I have seen what happens when the picture is not joined up. A non-verbal pupil whose needs were behavioural rather than medical, recorded diligently on a paper-based system, but invisible to the very SENDCO responsible for their support, because that information never sat in a system she could see. A paper file can be every bit as siloed as a digital one. The format is not the problem; the disconnection is.
There is an understandable temptation to reach for an all-in-one platform that promises to do everything. I would gently caution against it. A single vendor is not the same as a single source of truth. All-in-one modules tend to be transactional rather than analytical. They record incidents without surfacing patterns, and they are rarely designed around the realities of multi-agency working, SEND complexity or early-help thresholds.
The honest position, and the founding principle of our framework, is that no single platform can provide every capability a school needs. Specialist systems built by people who understand safeguarding, who understand medical needs, who understand behaviour, will always serve children better than a generic tool that does a little of everything. The answer is not to force everything into one box. It is to make the best systems work together as one connected infrastructure.
This is why CPOMS, Medical Tracker and VenturEd Solutions came together to form the Connected Safeguarding Alliance. We are competitors in the conventional sense, and we have chosen to collaborate, because the problem is bigger than any one of our products. We want to change how edtech supports schools, moving from a marketplace of isolated tools towards genuine interoperability, where information flows safely between systems and across services so that a school can finally hold a whole picture of every child.
The DfE White Paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, puts it well: parents, teachers and young people should never have to choose between academic excellence and inclusion. Delivering that ambition is not really about features. It is about designing the systems around a child to be coherent, joined-up and able to talk to one another, so that insight can move across safeguarding, health, behaviour and attendance instead of being locked away.
Whatever the next White Paper or inspection framework brings, my advice to the leaders I met is the same. Treat safeguarding, health and wellbeing as infrastructure, not as a set of tools to be ticked off. Ask hard questions of any system that claims to do everything. And expect more, from your suppliers and from the agencies around you, on information sharing.
Whatever the next White Paper or inspection framework brings, my advice to the leaders I met is the same. Treat safeguarding, health and wellbeing as infrastructure, not as a set of tools to be ticked off.
We are not asking trusts to take our framework on trust. We built it to be tested, and we want it held to a high bar by the people it is meant to serve. If you lead a trust and you recognise the picture I have described, I would welcome your challenge. The children who rely on us most cannot afford for us to keep navigating a kaleidoscope of disconnected data. We can do better, and I believe that by working together, edtech can lead the way.