Belong What Experts at Hand asks of a local area, and how Belong answers it

The offer itself

This will require strong partnership working and development in collaboration with local settings, health partners and families. Local areas will define the exact offer and distribution of resources, according to local circumstances, but we expect that support will primarily come from expert education and health services and from expert outreach from specialist settings, including Alternative Provision.

SEND reform: putting children and young people first, Department for Education

Belong is the place the offer lives. Your educational psychologists, speech and language therapists, specialist teachers and outreach services each own a development area in the directory and keep it current from inside the tool. A teacher looking for help with a need finds the strategies and the named team behind them in one place, without a referral.

Curating and creating resources for the universal offer

Scaling up will take time, so each local area should start establishing clear partnership governance to support delivery and fair allocation of expertise and resources. Initially, we expect the focus to be on upskilling of education staff to raise baseline knowledge across mainstream settings.

Belong starts from your ordinarily available provision. The directory is built from the document you already have, so the universal offer is your own words, organised so a teacher can use them on a Tuesday afternoon. Teachers self-serve. Your experts add to it as the offer grows, rather than reprinting a PDF every year.

Targeted and targeted plus

Practitioners will share effective strategies and interventions for commonly occurring needs and offer tailored guidance as needs change.

The same development areas run from universal to targeted. A teacher moves from whole-class strategies to graduated, individual ones without leaving the page, and the experts at hand curate what sits at each level. Nothing is a separate system.

Individual support plans

ISPs will be tailored in line with the layers of support, with guidance provided to help settings ensure they are high quality. For children receiving targeted support, ISPs should include evidence-based interventions from the National Inclusion Standards.

Belong's action plans are written against the same directory. A school writes its plan by picking the strategies it will use from your provision, so an ISP references named, evidence-based interventions by default. Your authority can read every plan across every school and see where support is thin before an inspection does.

Working with groups

Local authorities and Integrated Care Boards will commission expert professionals to work directly with mainstream settings. This will give settings easier and earlier access to expert advice without a child or young person requiring an assessment or referral, improving early support for more children through group-based approaches.

Belong gives a group one shared view. Schools in a group, their specialist base and their special school all see the same directory and the same audit. A domain lead for the group can see every school's audit and action plan side by side, which is what "working directly with settings" needs in practice.

The whole-school audit

The White Paper says settings "will be held accountable for delivering high-quality inclusive practice". Belong's whole-school SEND audit is how a school shows it, against your own provision rather than a generic checklist, and how your authority sees the picture across all of them. Had this existed through the pandemic, the rise in social, emotional and mental health need would have been visible in the action plans months before it reached the referral queue.