The evidence of a child’s progress is often so fragmented, it's invisible.

Nobody is short of evidence. They are short of time to assemble it.

In a specialist setting the things that matter most happen in ordinary moments. A child tries a strategy and it works. A child communicates a need for the first time in a week. A child comes back to an activity after being overwhelmed, and finishes it.

Those moments do get written down. They get written down in different places: a notebook, an incident form, a photograph, a conversation at the end of the day, a module of the school system somebody set up two years ago. Then an annual review comes round and staff spend evenings reconstructing a year of that into something a meeting can use. The work is valuable. Most of it is rework.

Describe what happened. The system carries the structure.

SHINE starts from what a member of staff can realistically do at four o’clock: describe the session in their own words. From one account of a group activity, SHINE produces a separate draft observation for each child mentioned, so a practitioner is checking and adjusting individual records rather than writing five of them from scratch.

It then suggests which of that child’s outcomes the observation might evidence: EHCP targets, IEP goals, communication, social skills, independence, academic progress. The suggestions stay suggestions. The practitioner edits the wording, keeps the links that are genuine and rejects the ones that are not. Nothing is saved until a person says so.

Over a year that produces something most settings could not produce easily before: a body of evidence already connected to the outcomes it is meant to evidence, gathered while the detail was still fresh.

Behaviour recorded as communication, not just as an incident

A behaviour record should help the next adult understand what happened, not simply confirm that something did. SHINE supports recording through Antecedent, Behaviour, Consequence and Communication: what was going on beforehand, what was seen, how adults responded, and what the child may have been telling us.

Staff can use a structured form or a guided conversation, whichever suits the moment they are in. Either way the child’s own context sits alongside the record: their non negotiables, how they communicate, what de-escalation actually works for them. That is the difference between a log and something a team can learn from.

SHINE has fundamentally changed the way we monitor, analyse and respond to behaviour within our school. It has enabled us to move beyond simple incident recording towards a more strategic, proactive and inclusive approach, driven by high-quality data and meaningful insights.

SENCO and Deputy Headteacher, Minehead First School, Beacon Education

Where the judgement stays

SHINE does not decide anything about a child. It does not set provision, score progress or categorise a young person. It drafts and it structures, and then it waits. Every record is reviewed, edited or rejected by the member of staff who was actually there.

That is a deliberate design choice, and it is also the reason settings are willing to use it at all. The expertise stays with the people who know the child. What gets taken away is the retyping.