It’s 2003, and I’m in the third year of my teaching career in an east London school. Anna (not her real name) had complex special educational needs and disabilities. She was also being abused at home by her father, who cited religious and cultural grounds for hitting her with a buckled belt.
Anna’s performance in tests and assessments was getting worse, but it was anecdotally attributed to her learning needs rather than the situation she was facing at home.
Until, that is, she felt able to show me the marks on her body and began to open up as to what caused them. It turned out that this had been going on for a couple of years.
An incomplete pupil picture
In Anna’s case, these serious safeguarding issues were being blurred by SEND, behaviour and cultural/religious conflicts. Back then, our systems simply weren’t able to integrate warnings, multiple data sources and flag holistic concerns.
Had they, it could have prevented further abuse and enabled the school to put in place the right social care interventions.
The reality was: Anna was bang in the middle of a “systems blind spot”. And if we are honest with ourselves, I’m not sure things have improved much since then. And if we are truly honest, I don’t think we even know how many children are in the blind spot, some 23 years on.
We talk often about educating the “whole child”. It is a phrase that trips easily off the tongue, but what does it really mean in practice?
Siloed school systems
The simple but deeply uncomfortable truth is that, for all our good intentions, the systems we have built to serve us in education are not designed to see a complete picture of a child’s life.
Each system only presents a partial picture or goes as far as a particular system needs to. For example, safeguarding record-keeping, behaviour logging, academic progress tracking, recording of parental interactions and even relevant medical information.
We all know it, and we all get frustrated about it - mainly because we have to log in and out of so many systems.
Don’t get me wrong, we don’t want to return to the paper-based record keeping and basic systems that we operated back in 2003, but we still rarely see the overall profile of each child in the broadest sense.
Attendance is on one platform; behaviour on another. Attainment somewhere else. Safeguarding, often rightly protected for confidentiality reasons, sits apart again.
Making connections
In many schools, these systems do not speak to one another. Even within a single trust, you might find different platforms for MIS, safeguarding, HR, finance and beyond; none of them is fully interoperable.
What we call a “whole child” is, in reality, arguably a collection of disconnected and fragmented data points. And in this case, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts - the whole is not even whole at all.
And what this inevitably means is that we rely on people to try to join up the dots and understand the whole picture.
In practice, a pastoral lead might notice a dip in attendance and wonder if it connects to a change in behaviour. A safeguarding concern might sit in one (highly locked down) system and never quite reach the classroom. Teachers are left holding partial pictures, each accurate in its own way, but not quite complete.
And the truth is that we all lose out because of that. Because, of course, it means that the pupils most at risk of being missed are not always the loudest or the most visible, but those who sit just below every threshold in every system or application.
Putting pupils first
The risks of carrying on like this are not abstract. They play out in real children’s lives. A pupil whose attendance slips by a few percentage points, whose behaviour remains broadly compliant, whose attainment drifts slowly downwards, can pass through a system without ever quite triggering intervention.
And it’s not because we don’t care - we all care deeply - but the systems aren’t built to capture this so that we can address it.
This is where the current conversation around a more universal child identifier becomes interesting. The idea of a single, shared view - something closer to the model we now see in the NHS, where information follows the individual rather than sitting in silos (the GP, the nurse, the hospital department or clinic) - has the potential to be a total game-changer.
Done well, it could allow schools to move from reactive to proactive, from isolated insights to connected understanding. And the sooner we can get there, the better.
Cultural change
But technology alone will not solve this. The challenge is as much about culture and leadership as it is about systems. Even with perfectly connected data, schools still need to ask: who is looking at the whole picture? And how do we ensure that insight leads to intervention, not just information that sits there on the cloud?
Where schools and trusts are beginning to get this right, the difference is tangible. Pastoral, academic and safeguarding teams are not operating in parallel but in concert. Patterns are spotted earlier, and support can be targeted more effectively. But perhaps most importantly of all, the children who were sitting right in the middle of that “blind spot” can now be seen.
That’s why at Anthem, the trust I lead, we have recently appointed a new role of head of data and insights, which includes a specific brief to review and improve the interoperability of our various systems and applications, so that we provide leaders and staff with a genuinely holistic understanding of the whole child. To help us see all of our children, including those in the blind spot.
I often think back to Anna from my early days in the classroom. In a more connected system, would we have understood her situation sooner? Would we have joined the dots in time to change what happened to her and how quickly the relevant agencies intervened?
I’d like to think so. But whether that is the case or not, we can decide whether we continue with systems that we know do not serve us well enough and miss children like her, or whether we build one that really provides us with 20:20 vision.
David Hatchett is CEO of Anthem Schools Trust
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