A teacher is usually the first to notice. A child who cannot find their water bottle two mornings out of three, who freezes every time the class moves from one activity to the next, who writes one line and stops. That noticing tends to stay where it started — in one teacher's head, or on a sheet of paper in a drawer — and by the time it is said out loud the details have gone.
Three forms, transcribed as the school already uses them
We did not design these instruments. The Inclusive Education module takes the paper forms a school was already filling in by hand and transcribes them item by item, wording intact:
- The Functional Profile Form — 41 items following a child through an ordinary school day, from arrival to going home: participation, movement and sensory needs, communication, food, self-care, transitions, then the teacher's own reflection and support planning.
- The Classroom Observation Checklist for Early Identification of Functional Learning and Participation Differences — 89 items, 76 of them rated Rarely, Sometimes, Often, or Not yet observed, each with room for a short factual note giving the example behind the rating.
- The Writing Assessment Checklist — 24 items asking whether a writing difficulty sits in motor control, understanding, language or regulation, rather than judging handwriting or correctness.
The checklist's own guidance stayed too: observe over several days and across different contexts, record what you see and not what you assume, and remember that one observation is not a conclusion.
It counts observations, not children
These instruments are explicitly non-diagnostic. They do not detect or name any condition, and nothing in the module gives a child a level, a category or a rank. What the system does is narrower, and worth stating plainly: it counts how many times a teacher ticked an answer the form itself treats as an area where support may be needed. A positively worded item — manages personal belongings, follows a two-step instruction — counts when it is rarely or not yet seen; an item describing a difficulty counts when it is seen often; the double-barrelled ones count in neither direction.
That is a count of adult observations, made on particular days in particular rooms. It is never a measurement of a child. The source instrument ends with a line we would not improve on: it is not for labelling children, it is a tool for noticing, documenting patterns, and asking better questions — questions to take to a Special Educator qualified to answer them.
Several teachers see the same child differently
A filled form can be shared with colleagues or with a school administrator, with or without permission to edit it. A child who is fine in the maths period and unreachable after lunch produces two accounts of the same term, and both are true. The subject teacher, the class teacher and the coordinator should be working on one record, not three.
Shared editing only works if nothing changes quietly, so every change is kept: each save records who made it and when, and lists every answer that moved — question by question, old value and new, written out in words. A save that changes nothing writes nothing, so the history stays a record of decisions rather than a log of autosaves. Only the teacher who created an entry, or a school administrator, can delete it or manage who it is shared with.
Written on a phone, on a bad connection
An 89-question form is a long thing to lose. Every change is mirrored on the device as it is typed, and flushed the moment the tab is backgrounded. Online, the form saves itself a few seconds after the teacher stops typing; a save made offline joins the write queue and goes through when the connection returns. Forms stay drafts until submitted, so a checklist can be filled across the several days of observation it is supposed to take.
The pattern a single sheet cannot show
School leadership gets a findings view over the forms filled in a chosen period: which sections, and which individual questions, most often have support noted, how those observations sit across grades, and who on the staff is filling forms at all. There is a CSV export, and entries are counted by the date the child was observed rather than the date someone got round to typing it in.
It exists so a coordinator can see what no single sheet reveals — that several teachers, in different grades, have independently noted the same thing this term. That is a prompt to look closer and to involve someone qualified, not a finding about any child. The view is limited to school administrators; teachers see the entries they wrote or were shared with, and students and parents never see these forms at all.
Off until a school asks for it
The module is off for every school by default; our team turns it on per school, and the school can then close individual grades. That friction is deliberate. Forms describing how a child eats, uses the toilet and manages their feelings should not appear in a school's menu unasked — a school should have decided it wants them, and thought about who fills them, who reads them, and where the observations get taken. Closing a grade later stops new forms being filed without stranding the ones already written.
There is no AI anywhere in this module, and that is the right shape for it. A structured form, a careful history, and a count — the paper a school already trusted, kept somewhere it can be shared, revisited, and turned into a conversation that does not start a year too late.