SINGAPORE: The founder and chief executive of an early years compliance platform has received a Women in Innovation grant to develop a digital SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) tool for nurseries.
Maggie Bolger, who founded Get Otii Ltd last year, has been awarded the grant from Innovate UK to develop an Inclusion Hub within the platform.
The Hub is designed to join up records available to nurseries, parents and professionals about a child so they are available in one place.
The grant, which could total up to £75,000, funds a research and development phase which will test whether a shared digital record would work as a replacement for ‘the printouts, separate systems and memory that a child’s SEND information currently gets spread across’.
The launch of the first phase of the project comes ahead of the introduction of Ofsted’s updated inclusion standards from 1 September.
Bolger described the standards as ‘right’ and accompanying guidance as ‘genuinely good’ but said problems may arise with no central platform to collate documents – which is what she hopes the platform will resolve.
‘The observations sit in one system, the notes in another, and the parent conversation stays in somebody’s head. By the time the local authority, the health visitor or the school the child moves on to needs the whole picture, it sits in six places and none of them agree. Nobody in that room is short of care. They are short of hours.
‘That fragmentation has a cost, and families pay it. When a nursery raises a concern, what reaches the local authority is only as strong as what the setting managed to pull together that week. What a parent can carry on their own is weaker still.
‘We are testing whether one simple workflow can join up the nursery, the parent and the professionals, so everyone is singing off the same hymn sheet and the picture we build follows the child instead of starting again,’ she said.
The grant will also support tests around areas in which the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can simplify workflow for practitioners.
Bolger added, ‘AI can flag, prioritise and draft. It does not make the call. That is the line we don’t cross.’
Bolger, who has worked in early years for more than 20 years, was inspired to launch Get Otii after a ‘tough’ Ofsted inspection as a setting’s Nominated Individual, the person legally accountable for the provision where she found the data she was answerable for was neither in order nor in one place.