The new way versus the old way

Every council has one of these already

Every council has a graduated approach or an ordinarily available provision document. Usually it is a PDF, sometimes a Word document, and it was right on the day it was published. After that it is hard to find, hard to search and impossible to keep up to date. As one SENCO put it to us,

"Provision grids are good, but then they're static, aren't they?"

Now the reforms are asking councils to write down what every mainstream school provides, to help schools check themselves against it, and to get specialist help into every school rather than one child at a time. That is the same document doing 3 jobs, and none of them work well on paper.

Belong starts from your document

We do not start from a blank page and we do not bring our own vocabulary. We build the directory from your document, in your words, and your specialist teams write the recommendations under each expectation, and curate the resources. They are the Experts at Hand, and they co-produce the resources. 

It can change the week the evidence changes

When the Fonagy review came out in October, a printed document would need a new reprint. With Belong you can update the same day. That is the point of a directory your own teams keep. New evidence goes in the week it appears, a resource that turned out to be weak comes out, and nothing waits for the next print run.

The audit uses the same words as the directory

When a SENCO rates their school against an expectation, the guidance for that expectation is right there, with the resources to support. The audit tells you where the school is, the directory tells you what to do about it, and the action plan joins the two. One set of words runs through all of it, and that is the bit I think makes the difference.

It came out of the work that shaped the reforms

We built Belong inside the DfE Change Programme with Leeds and Calderdale co-producing everything. The programme's findings fed the 2026 reforms.

And it was built the way it asks schools to work

Co-production was not a workshop at the start. Over 200 people had a hand in the first version. The audit used today is the second version, built on the feedback of many SENCOs. This is how we work on all our digital projects.