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For the last two years, Cambian Northampton School has been using a pre-release version of SPENCER to support the identification and response to need for the young people they work with. Our CTO, Fergus McShane, caught up with SENDCo Chloe Nannery to see how SPENCER is used in the school to gain insight into need at an early stage, and respond to that need with actionable strategies.

Fergus: Thank you very much for speaking with us. To start, can you give us some context around your school and how you are currently using SPENCER?

Chloe: I work for Cambian Northampton School, an independent secondary school for students with Social, Emotional, and Mental Health (SEMH) difficulties. All our students have Education, Health, and Care Plans (EHCPs) in place. We are a small school with 24 students, all of whom have SEMH needs, and some have additional needs, such as ADHD or ASD, and face difficulties related to attachment and trauma. We find SPENCER very helpful for our students.

In terms of how we use SPENCER, we have a system in place where the key workers—staff who work one-on-one with students generally every day — as well as the tutors, sit down together to complete a SPENCER Spencer profile for each student. We do this for all the students at the school, usually at the start of the term. However, we need some time to get to know new students, so we haven't done it this term yet. Generally, we conduct these profiles three times a year: around September-October, January-February, and May-June.

We also use the data to compare each profile to the previous one, which is really useful. If we have students with particular difficulties, it's important to track how these change over time. Some of our students come from disadvantaged families, have social care involvement, or face general difficulties outside of school, so we can expect changes throughout the year. There are also school-related factors to consider. For example, the six-weeks off for [summer] is often particularly challenging for our students because they need routine and structure. We sometimes notice a dip in their progress between the end of summer and returning in September. It's interesting to see these changes over time.

We look at several data points from the profile itself. One of the first things we look at is the high concerns raised by the SPENCER profile. We might look at how many high or moderate concerns are identified in one profile, and that can change over time. For example, one student might have many high and moderate concerns in one term, and in the next term, this may have increased or decreased. This is an interesting data point to determine if what we are doing is effective in supporting our students. Ideally, that is the case and generally that is what we’ve seen.

When we were first introduced to SPENCER, it was explained to us that if we targeted the highest concerns then, ideally in the next profile, those wouldn't be the highest points of concern anymore because we would have implemented strategies from SPENCER to address them. We like to see those changes in what the top concern is, as well as the number of concerns.

We look at this data, how many high, moderate, and low level concerns they have over time, on both an individual basis and at the whole school level. At the whole school level, we can see which concerns are most frequently occurring. Not everybody has the same difficulties but often there is a degree of overlap. If a particular difficulty affects, say, 90% of the students, that allows us to put in place additional training or support for our staff to tackle that issue on a school-wide basis in addition to implementing individual strategies. We run some analysis on this, and we've found that many of our students face difficulties with concentration, attention, hyperactivity, impulsivity, and social communication concerns as well as general learning concerns.

On the other end of the spectrum, we like seeing which students have quite low-level concerns or potentially no concerns. So, although we are an independent specialist school, we do also say that if there is a student who is capable of doing so and is able to do so, we would like to support them in transitioning back into a mainstream education. Now, we are realistic and understand that's not appropriate for all the students that attend our school. However, there are some occasions where that is appropriate. It might be that a student has had lots of changes and lots of disruption in their current circumstances, and so, for now, they do need that kind of nurturing, one-to-one support that we offer.

But it might be that, actually, after a year or two of being with us, things have calmed down quite a lot. They've learned the strategies for managing and regulating their emotions, and their academic skills are actually in line with their peers. In those cases, we have returned two students back to mainstream schools successfully. And interestingly, those two students, when we've completed their SPENCER profiles, they are the students that have come up with no high concerns.

Fergus: That’s fantastic! Can you remind me when you started using SPENCER?

Chloe: At least two years ago, possibly three years now.

Fergus: So, before you had SPENCER, what were the challenges you faced and how has SPENCER helped address them?

Chloe: For starters, SPENCER is excellent at identifying key concerns, which can be challenging for some staff members. While some staff can interpret signs and behaviours, SPENCER is much more objective than we can be. Sometimes, staff working closely with a student when they’re in the moment might not always be able to think about what may be triggering behaviours or causing issues. SPENCER allows staff to take the time to consider what the key issues for a student might be.

While we do have EHCPs that outline the needs of our students these are done by educational psychologists or clinical psychologists and the demand for them is very high. As a result, it’s hard to access that. So to get something objective that says “this student is struggling with XYZ” is really helpful.

Secondly, the actual interventions that are suggested are really useful. So, for example, although we have certain mandatory training for all of our staff at Northampton School, if you've got one member of staff who is a key worker for a particular student with a specific difficulty, how can they actually target that one difficulty? What can we do to make a difference?

Even when it comes to things like mental health issues, organisations such as CAMHS have such high demand. Yes, we can make referrals to these specialist areas, different companies, or agencies to get external support. However, that isn't always possible for everyone, depending on whether they meet the criteria of how severe the difficulty is. With SPENCER, it makes support more accessible for everybody. Even if you don’t have specialist knowledge yourself, SPENCER provides you with it. It tells you what the best strategies are, and it gives you a few options as well, because we all know that every student, every child, is different.

Although one child may be labelled as having the same difficulty as another child, the approach you take may need to be completely different. How one person responds to one intervention might be completely different from another. So, it does give you options. A member of staff can try one intervention, and if it doesn't work, they can try a different one. Or, they could choose, based on their own knowledge of the child, which strategy they think would be most beneficial to start with. It really helps in getting those intervention strategies in place at an earlier stage as making the referrals can take quite some time.

There was one student potentially showing signs of OCD, for example, and their family wasn't sure where to go with their concerns. We completed both the Parent* and School [Professional] SPENCER profiles, and they showed a lot of overlap in concerns. SPENCER provided clear signposts for the parents, like seeing a GP, while also suggesting strategies they could implement at home while waiting for a specialist appointment. This early support can make a big difference before an issue potentially worsens.

Fergus: That’s amazing! So, as a final question, I understand you recently had an Ofsted inspection, and they commented on the use of SPENCER. How did Ofsted respond to your use of SPENCER?

Chloe: We use several tools to measure progress and measure lots of different types of progress - whether academic, related to SEMH, or other development. One of the things we focus on is social and emotional development, which also ties into academics by identifying issues like concentration and learning difficulties. We use SPENCER every term, as I mentioned, and we generate an SEMH tracker over the whole school year that follows each student. This includes data from other categories as well, but the SPENCER information did contribute quite a lot towards that. It just gives you a more objective measure of “how is this student doing?”

Although I could sit and tell Ofsted inspectors, parents, social workers, or any other professionals my own personal opinion, that is not as strong as having objective evidence. For example, having an objective score that shows in this term, a student had this many high concerns, and now they've got more, so we need to put something in place. Then, after we've put something in place, if the score goes down and they don't have as many high concerns, it shows that the strategy is working. SPENCER really helps to evidence that, which is otherwise quite difficult to do without it being subjective.

Otherwise, it can be very opinionated and could vary from person to person. Ultimately, it could still be affected by the person who creates the SPENCER profile, but the way we do it, as I said at the beginning, is by getting the key worker to complete it, and that is key. You need the right person to complete the profile so that it's accurate. If that profile is accurate, it absolutely works.

I'll be honest, there have been a couple of times where I've received a profile, looked at it myself, and thought, "I'm not entirely sure this is completely true." I've then asked them to take another look at it, or to go through it with another member of staff, and sometimes it can change. But, actually, you then get a much more accurate profile. 

Ofsted did like the fact that a school could track that progress quite continuously across the year and see that progress written down quite factually and in a way that’s very easy to understand. It's just there on the page, if that makes sense. I don’t need to explain it—it works, and the data shows that. It also shows that putting these strategies in place works for those students, and gradually, the concerns lower.

I would say that, generally, when we monitor our behaviour and safeguarding concerns, they have decreased as well. Whether that’s because our staff have become more familiar with these issues, or because of the additional training we've put in place, or whether it literally started from using SPENCER and getting in there quickly before things potentially worsen—starting early and tackling any issues that are coming up—I think that's really important.

Fergus: Thank you so much, Chloe, for taking the time to share this with us.

*SPENCER Parent is an upcoming addition to the SPENCER family - follow us on LinkedIn to find out when it’s released!

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