In the latest of our blog posts celebrating our 2025 NASS Award winners, we’re spotlighting our 2025 Innovation Award winners, Northern Counties School.
Northern Counties School is a Non-Maintained Special School in Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne, offering provision supporting learners aged 3 to 19 with a wide range of complex needs, including autism, sensory impairments, communication difficulties, and profound and multiple learning difficulties.
They received the 2025 NASS Innovation Award for developing a groundbreaking therapy outcome measure tool, designed to better capture the impact of therapy on learners with complex needs—supporting improvements in wellbeing, independence, and access to education.
Next week, we’ll be opening entries for our 2026 awards, so watch this space!
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By Louise Allport, Assistant Head (Therapy), Northern Counties School
At Northern Counties School, we have developed a groundbreaking tool to measure therapy outcomes for children with complex needs. By adapting the national Therapy Outcome Measures (TOMs), we created the Paediatric Learning Disability and Complex Needs MDT scale, designed specifically for learners with profound disabilities, sensory needs, and communication challenges.
We developed this tool in collaboration with NHS teams, special schools, local authorities, and national charities to ensure it captures real changes in wellbeing, independence, and learning. Its accessible format supports families, guides our therapy, and informs commissioners. Now published in the TOMs manual, it is embedded across our school and gaining national recognition through conference presentations, training programmes, and professional publications.
What is TOM?
TOM (Therapy Outcome Measures) is an evidence-based, validated outcome measurement tool used widely in education and NHS services to measure the impact of therapy intervention. Endorsed by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, TOM provides a structured way to evidence progress.
Over the past year, we have worked closely with TOM’s author, Pam Enderby, to develop our own measurement scale, which has now been published in the latest edition of the TOM manual. We are proud that this development project was recognised nationally, with our team winning a National Association of Special Schools (NASS) Innovation Award at the 2025 conference.
How did we develop the scale?
We researched best practice and the range of tools available to use before developing our own bespoke scale that best reflected the needs of our learners. We arranged workshops with a range of professionals to gather feedback on the scale and liaised with the author of TOM, Pam Enderby.
We provided training to our therapy teams in how to use the scale and competed validity and reliability tests.
The news scale, Paediatric Learning Disability and Complex Needs MDT, measures the impact of therapy across four key areas:
- Impairment
- Activity
- Participation
- Wellbeing
Benefits
We now use the TOM scale to measure effects on day-to-day functioning, wellbeing, independence, and participation in activities. It enables us to capture our learners’ progress in achieving meaningful goals and improving their quality of life.
The scales are clear and accessible, with language that is understandable to all stakeholders. They also act as a reflective tool, enhancing clinical reasoning, goal setting reviews, and positively influencing the quality of therapy the learner receives.
Data analysis has shown that we can spot trends in wellbeing levels and participation in activity levels and amend our interventions and focus of practice accordingly.
Do you want to know more?
If you would like to find out more about the TOM scale, please contact Louise Allport (Assistant Head, Therapy) on 01912815821 or at l.allport@percyhedley.org.uk.
Listen to the Northern Counties School team on SENDcast! (with thanks to our NASS partner B Squared)
In this episode, hosted by Dale Pickles, Mollie Saint-Henaghan (Speech and Language Therapist) and Zoe Cook (Occupational Therapist) from Northern Counties School discuss how they developed a tool to measure therapy outcomes for children with complex needs, and the positive difference it is already making to practice and pupil progress.
Listen: https://thesendcast.com/product/measuring-therapy-outcomes-at-northern-counties-school/
Watch a short video about Northern Counties' new outcome measure tool: 2025 NASS Awards Innovation Winner: Northern Counties School - YouTube
To read about our other 2025 NASS Award finalists and winners, please visit: https://nasschools.org.uk/announcing-our-2025-nass-award-winners/