What We Learned From a Year of Working With SENCOs

Tomorrow is the last day of term. For the first time in my life, I won't be counting down to six weeks off.

That still feels strange to write. I spent years in a classroom where the summer holidays marked the end of one thing and the start of another. This year, Senflow carries straight through. And as I sit here on the last day before schools break up, thinking about everything that's gone into preparing schools for September, it felt like the right moment to reflect on what this year has actually taught us about SEND management and SENCO support.

We didn't build Senflow from a boardroom or a spreadsheet of market research. We built it from watching, first hand, what SEND coordination actually looks like inside a school. But a year of speaking to hundreds of SENCOs, headteachers, and MAT leaders has taught us things we didn't fully understand until we were in it.

Here's what stayed with us.

No two SENCOs are drowning in the same way

When we started building SEND management software, we assumed the core problem was roughly the same everywhere: too much admin, not enough time. That's true, but it's not the whole picture.

Some SENCOs are drowning in EHCP paperwork because their school has a large and growing SEND cohort. Others are drowning because they're covering the role alongside a full teaching timetable, with no dedicated time at all. Others are managing a small cohort but with enormously complex needs, where every decision carries weight and every record matters.

The systems that work have to flex to all of these realities, not just the average case. That's shaped how we've built Senflow far more than we expected when we started.

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The problem isn't a lack of care. It's a lack of infrastructure

This is the thing that comes up in almost every conversation we have with a school. Nobody we've spoken to this year has ever said their SENCO doesn't care enough, or isn't skilled enough, or isn't trying hard enough.

What we hear, consistently, is that brilliant, committed people are working inside systems that were never built to support them. Spreadsheets that only one person understands. Information that lives in someone's head rather than somewhere anyone else can find it. Deadlines tracked manually, with no safety net if something gets missed.

We left teaching, and built Senflow, because we believed this was fixable. A year in, we believe it more than ever.

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MAT leaders are asking a different question than we expected

When we first started speaking to multi-academy trusts, we assumed the conversation would mostly be about individual schools needing help. What we've actually found is that trust leaders are asking a bigger question: how do we know what's happening across every school in our trust, not just the ones that happen to flag a problem?

That question comes up again and again, from CEOs, from Directors of Inclusion, from Heads of SEND. It's not really about any single school's paperwork. It's about visibility, consistency, and knowing that no school in the trust is quietly struggling without anyone realising until it's too late.

This has shaped a huge amount of what we've worked on this year, and it's a big part of the conversations we're now having with trusts across the country. If you're a MAT leader thinking about this, our piece on how Senflow supports multi-academy trusts goes into more detail on what trust-wide visibility can actually look like.

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Small changes make an enormous difference

We didn't expect quite how much impact small, unglamorous changes could have. Not sweeping transformation, just small shifts: a SENCO no longer needing to manually chase every annual review deadline. A teacher being able to see a pupil's provision without emailing the SENCO to ask. A headteacher being able to pull together evidence for governors in minutes rather than days.

None of these individually sound revolutionary. But when a SENCO tells us they've got their evenings back, or a headteacher tells us they finally feel confident walking into an Ofsted conversation about SEND provision, that's when it becomes real. We've written before about what schools need to demonstrate for SEND compliance, and it's a theme that keeps coming up in almost every school we work with.

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The scale of the SEND coordination challenge is bigger than we understood

We started Senflow because of what we'd personally seen in the schools we knew. What we didn't fully appreciate was quite how widespread this SEND management challenge is. This year we've worked with schools from Newcastle to East Sussex, mainstream primaries and specialist provisions, small standalone schools and large multi-academy trusts.

The specifics differ everywhere. The underlying story doesn't. SEND coordination has grown faster than most schools' capacity to manage it, and the gap is being held together by people working far harder than they should have to.

What comes next

Fourteen weeks ago I left teaching to work on this full time. It's been the most out of my comfort zone I've ever felt, and also the first time I've been completely certain we were building something that mattered.

We're not finished. There's a lot more to build, a lot more schools to support, and a long way to go before SEND coordination feels the way it should in every school we work with. But this year has given us something we didn't have at the start: real evidence, from real schools, that this approach works.

To every SENCO, headteacher, and trust leader who has trusted us with a piece of your school's SEND provision this year, thank you. This has been built with you, not just for you, and that hasn't changed and never will.

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Have a well earned summer. We'll see you in September.

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