Mountjoy School

The challenge

Mountjoy is a small complex needs school in rural West Dorset serving pupils aged between 2½ and 19 years from both Devon and Dorset. The special educational needs and disability (SEND) range from Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to Profound and Multiple Learning Disabilities (PMLD), Severe Learning Difficulties (SLD) and complex medical conditions. Most of our pupils will have multiple SEND.

The needs of our children and young people are increasingly complex and year on year our Safeguarding and Child Protection cases increase. Our former systems were cumbersome and archaic, did not offer the best care possible and were both labour intensive and slow. There was a substantial potential for misreporting, losing or just missing a vital piece of the puzzle that is Child Protection.

The particular challenges that Mountjoy was facing included the increasing amount of time we were spending on Safeguarding and our inability to provide timely and relevant information when called for.

The solution - Tes MyConcern

MyConcern was first introduced to us by a fellow Headteacher, who had been involved with its development from the beginning.

An experienced MyConcern trainer attended our school within a week. The system was clearly explained and our hand was held throughout the process - we are not the most IT savvy school around and therefore needed and gained support here!

Implementing Tes MyConcern

As soon as our Safeguarding team had seen the software and recognised the integrity with which it has been designed, we immediately knew that this was a piece of software that would work for us.

It would alleviate our growing paper mountain, automatically compile chronologies and reports and allow us to not only manage Safeguarding but also begin to easily identify trends at individual and school level.

Initially, there was some extra work to do; transferring any system from paper to a digital solution clearly needs some thought but it was actually quite straightforward. The training we received from the MyConcern team was excellent albeit the system is really intuitive to use. In the early stages, we did have to manage our own anxieties about not writing everything down on paper – but now we would never go back!

The outcomes