In special schools, the question is rarely whether a child is making progress — staff often know long before it appears in the data. Yet some of the most important progress learners make can be difficult to capture through traditional measures.
The challenge is evidencing that progress in a way that parents, Ofsted, local authorities and children themselves can see, trust and act on.
In this guest blog for NASS, PAGS Founder & CEO, Feliciea Jibson, and Josianne Pisani, Head of Training and Development, reflect on why making 'invisible' progress visible matters, the framework they have developed to address this complex challenge and the impact it is having in schools such as Stone Soup Academy.
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In special school settings, the most important question is rarely whether a child is making progress. Staff can usually sense it long before any data confirms it. The harder question is how to evidence that progress in a way that parents, Ofsted, local authorities and the children themselves can see, trust and act on.
Confidence has grown. Self-esteem has improved. Emotional regulation is stronger. These are not marginal gains; they are often the most significant outcomes of education in specialist settings. Yet they remain difficult to evidence consistently in existing formal systems that were not designed to capture them. When they sit only in the professional judgement of the staff who witnessed them, they are difficult to defend in an Ofsted dialogue, difficult to translate into an EHCP review, and difficult to share with a parent who wants to understand exactly what has changed and why.
This tension sits at the heart of many conversations across special schools today – how to make the “invisible” progress visible.
What progress looks like inside schools (but is not visible outside them)
Across special schools, a familiar reality exists. Professionals hold deep knowledge and understanding about their pupils that is rarely captured in the surrounding systems. A teaching assistant may know exactly which sensory triggers preceded dysregulation. A keyworker may know that a particular peer relationship was the breakthrough of the term. A parent may know that mornings at home have transformed. Each of these is meaningful evidence of progress, but none of it usually makes it into a formal record.
The result, repeated across hundreds of schools, is the same: progress that adults can sense but cannot consistently measure. And progress that cannot be measured cannot be defended — to inspectors, to commissioners, or to the families whose trust depends on seeing change made visible.
Why this remains difficult to capture
A range of tools already exists across behaviour, wellbeing, engagement and pastoral tracking. Many are useful within specific contexts. The problem is that most operate in isolation, rely on a single perspective, or produce data that cannot be aggregated meaningfully across a year, a cohort, or a school. It creates a gap between what schools know about pupils and what systems can show about them.
Increasingly, this is where broader questions are emerging across the sector: how can non-traditional data – behavioural, emotional, social, communicative, sensory and motivational - be captured in a way that is consistent enough to be shared, but still sensitive enough to reflect the individual child?
A framework built to address the complex problem
PAGS (Profile, Assessment and Goal Setting) was developed in close collaboration with practitioners and independently evaluated by researchers at University College London’s Institute of Education against standardised measures. The framework profiles each child across six interconnected domains – behaviour, cognition, communication, motivation, learning preferences and emotional needs – and is completed by the adults who know the child best, including parents. Each profile produces a clear baseline, identifies the specific barriers to learning getting in that child’s way and generates targeted strategies that staff can use immediately.
Crucially, the same instrument is used over time, so progress is measured relative to the child’s own starting point rather than against an external benchmark that may never have been appropriate for them. A nine-month shift in emotional regulation is visible. A sustained improvement in peer interaction is visible. A reduction in the triggers that previously led to walking off site is visible. That data exists in charts, in reports, in a form that a SENDCo can put in front of a parent at a parents’ evening or an Ofsted inspector in a deep dive.
What changes when the data exists
Stone Soup Academy, a specialist alternative provision in Nottingham, adopted PAGS across the whole school — not as a SENCO tool, but as a shared platform used by senior leaders, teachers, teaching assistants, pastoral and engagement teams alike. The results illustrate what becomes possible when non-traditional progress is captured systematically and across every adult who knows the child.
Before PAGS, the school’s SEND data lived in paper trails, email threads, hard drives and separate systems. Interventions were managed by one person. The SENCO could work directly with three students a day. There was no consistent progress reporting and no real-time overview for SLT. Most of the effort went into managing the paperwork rather than the children.
Whole-school adoption changed the operating model. Every adult who works with a learner now records their work in PAGS. Every teacher can see a child’s targets and strategies before a session begins. SLT contribute their own interventions alongside frontline staff. Every student receives a termly progress report, and those reports become an active conversation with the learner about how they are tracking — rather than a document produced at the end of a term.
The measurable shifts have been significant. Targeted learners have moved from 1% attendance to 70% — students who had effectively given up on education are now in school, in lessons, and engaging. Students average seven qualifications each, including English and maths; one learner achieved thirteen. The SEND Lead works with up to five students a day rather than three. Dysregulated students stay focused in lessons. Many now use grounding techniques during exams.
In June 2025, Stone Soup was judged Outstanding for the third consecutive time — with the inspection citing progress in attendance, behaviour, academic success and destination outcomes. Whole-school adoption of PAGS contributed directly to the evidence base behind that judgement.
“In our last Ofsted inspection in June 2025 we were recognised as Outstanding for the third time, due to progress in attendance, behaviour, academic success and destination. PAGS has been an amazing resource. It should be used in all schools.” — Younes Henini, Principal, Stone Soup Academy
What both the Principal and SEND Lead emphasise is the relational shift underneath the numbers. Parents arrive at parents’ evening and see, in chart form, exactly how their child has changed. EHCP reviews are anchored in concrete progression rather than narrative impression. Students themselves describe the sessions as the reason they have become more confident, better regulated, more able to trust the adults around them. The intervention is not separate from their identity; it is the framework through which they have come to understand their own growth.
“I have worked in education for 20 years. By using PAGS that journey has been made a lot easier. Instead of seeing three children a day because of all the different hurdles we used to go through, I can now see up to five students a day. Before, interventions were not being recorded. Now the whole school is doing them.” — Michelle Bramhall, SEND Lead, Stone Soup Academy
What this means for Ofsted, EHCPs and the wider system
Ofsted’s framework increasingly asks schools to demonstrate, not assert, that pupils are developing the personal qualities, resilience and self-knowledge that prepare them for adult life. For special schools, this has always been the core of the work. What has historically been missing is a credible method for evidencing it.
The most striking thing about Stone Soup’s inspection experience was not that the data existed — it was that the data was already built. When the inspectors arrived, the school had a complete, timestamped record of every intervention, every target and every piece of progress, captured by every adult who had worked with each child. Nothing had to be assembled under inspection pressure. The evidence simply was the work.
When inspectors can see longitudinal data showing how individual pupils have progressed across emotional, social and cognitive domains — and how staff have used that data to inform planning, intervention and resource allocation — the conversation changes. The school is no longer making a case for what it knows is happening. It is showing the inspector exactly how it knows.
The same applies to EHCP reviews, annual reviews and LA commissioning conversations. Outcomes data anchored in a validated framework carries weight that narrative observation alone cannot. For families, it provides reassurance that the school’s understanding of their child is structured, shared and progressive rather than dependent on the memory of any single member of staff.
What we have learned
Three things have stood out since PAGS began being used at scale.
First, the staff knowledge that exists inside special schools is extraordinary — and almost always under-captured. The framework’s value is less in introducing new insight than in giving existing insight somewhere structured to live, accumulate and travel.
Second, parents respond differently when progress is shown rather than described. The trust that builds when a parent sees a chart of their child’s emotional regulation over two terms is qualitatively different from the trust that builds through verbal reassurance, however genuine.
Third — and this is the point that matters most to us — the children themselves change when the adults around them can see them more fully. When a child knows that the people supporting them understand specifically what is hard, specifically what is working, and specifically what has changed, something shifts. Confidence becomes earned rather than encouraged. Progress becomes their own story rather than someone else’s report on them.
That, in the end, is why we built it. Not to add another measurement tool to a sector that has plenty. But to make sure that the progress special schools have always known they were achieving could finally be seen — by everyone who needed to see it.