Over 1.7 million children in England have identified special educational needs. The people working with them are stretched to breaking point. We believe a significant part of that burden is caused by software that was never designed for the work they do, and that this is fixable.
A school using Zones of Regulation and a school using the PACE model are not using different terminology for the same thing. They have fundamentally different models of what a child's regulation means, what an incident is, and what good evidence looks like. Every generic SaaS product in this market has made the compromise of ignoring this. We think that is wrong.
The standard response to workforce pressure in specialist education is to call for more staff or better training. We think a significant portion of that burden is caused by software that was designed for the wrong purpose, tools built for mainstream schools, retrofitted for SEND, that generate work rather than reduce it.
The best-resourced settings in England have systems that fit how they work. The rest are making do with tools that were never built for them. We do not think this is inevitable. The code is the easy part. The judgement is the hard part, and it is what we bring.
Every setting we work with deepens our understanding of how specialist education actually operates. Over time, that accumulated knowledge becomes something genuinely valuable to the whole sector: evidence of what works, patterns that predict risk, benchmarks that settings can learn from.
The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act became law. A new three-tier SEN framework. Standardised digital EHCPs and Individual Support Plans. A Single Unique Identifier across education, health, and care. Local authorities must submit reform plans by June.
From 2029, every child with identified SEND needs will require a digital Individual Support Plan, produced and maintained by their setting. Most specialist settings are not yet equipped for this. The software they have was not built to meet these requirements. The transition window, from now until 2029, is the period in which settings need to build the systems and practices that will. We have already started.
We built SHINE because the software practitioners need does not exist. It is a system of record configured entirely to the way your setting actually works: your therapeutic framework, your data model, your workflows.
It is the first platform built on our core conviction: that generic systems force specialist settings to compromise their practice, and that this compromise is no longer necessary.
Every setting we configure deepens our understanding of how specialist education actually operates, building an intelligence layer for the sector that gets more useful with every school that joins it.
The Anthill Group was founded by two people who have spent years inside specialist education settings. We know what a day in the life of staff working in SEND looks like: the friction between staying compliant and spending time with the children. We started building what should have existed in the first place.
Read about Amy and Nikky →We can walk you through what SHINE looks like configured to your therapeutic framework and your workflows. Or if you just want to talk through the problem first, that works too.
