Choosing SEND software for your school: a buyer’s checklist for SENCOs

Start with the job, not the features

SEND software is worth paying for when it removes work a SENCO already does: chasing deadlines, rebuilding the same evidence for every review, re-typing the register from the MIS, and answering “what is this costing and is it working”. Write down the three tasks that take most of your SENCO time, and judge every product by whether it makes those faster. The SENCO workload evidence suggests administration is where most time goes.

For the SENCO: statutory coverage

• Does it track the statutory EHC needs assessment timescales and annual review dates, with reminders to more than one person?
• Can it hold a support plan for every pupil on SEN support, with termly reviews, and is it ready for the proposed Individual Support Plans?
• Does it keep a costed provision map with entry and exit measures, not just a list of interventions?
• Can it gather parent, pupil and staff views without you chasing email attachments?
• Will it build an annual review or assessment request pack from what is already recorded, and export it to Word?

For the business manager and IT lead: fit with your systems

• Does it sync with your MIS (Arbor, SIMS, Bromcom, ScholarPack), and is that read-only? Through which integration provider?
• Can staff sign in with their school Google or Microsoft account, and can you switch passwords off so leavers lose access automatically?
• Is pricing per school or per pupil, what does a multi-academy trust pay, and what happens to your data if you stop?
• Does it meet the DfE’s digital and technology standards for cyber security and cloud solutions?

For the data protection officer

SEND records are special category data about children. The DfE’s guidance on data protection in schools includes a section on procuring EdTech; your DPO will want answers to at least these:

• Where is data stored, and which sub-processors see it? Is there a published list?
• Is every school’s data separated at the database level, not only in the user interface?
• Is two-factor authentication available for every user and mandatory for the supplier’s own staff?
• Is there an audit log of who viewed or changed what?
• If AI is used, what is sent, is it pseudonymised, is it used to train models, and can you turn it off per pupil?
• Is there a data processing agreement you can sign before the trial, and can you export everything at any time?

Run a fair trial

Use a real (or realistic) case: one pupil with an EHC plan approaching annual review, and one on SEN support. Time how long it takes to produce the review pack and the support plan, and ask a colleague who has never seen the product to find a pupil’s current provision. Ask for the security and sub-processor pages before entering any real data.

Sendiphany publishes its security, sub-processors and responsible AI pages and offers a free 30-day trial with no card, so you can run this checklist against it.