Specialist education provider Outcomes First Group (OFG) has launched a new framework designed to improve how progress for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is measured and supported.
The initiative, known as Progress X, aims to address longstanding concerns around SEND assessment: an area recently highlighted by the Department for Education (DfE) as both challenging and essential within the Curriculum and Assessment Review.
The framework’s launch comes at a significant moment for the sector, with mainstream schools preparing for greater inclusion expectations ahead of the forthcoming Schools White Paper.
Professor Becky Francis CBE, Chair of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, has emphasised the need for an accountability system that “captures and celebrates the progress” of pupils with SEND and incentivises inclusive curriculum design.
According to OFG, Progress X has been developed to respond directly to this challenge. Dr Rebecca Lawton, Quality and Compliance Director at OFG, said traditional measures such as SATs and Progress 8 do not adequately reflect the development of many pupils with complex needs.
“Many of our children simply cannot access formal testing,” she said. “These tools often overlook vital areas of development such as independence, creativity and wider sporting achievement.”
The Progress X model links directly to pupils’ Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) targets, creating personalised goals that are reviewed every half term by multidisciplinary teams. Progress is assessed on a developmental scale (emerging, developing, secure and mastery) allowing for more flexible and responsive intervention.
A centralised digital dashboard underpins the system, enabling analysis of pupil progress by school, region, diagnosis and other key indicators. It also tracks post-school destinations and benchmarks performance against available national data, or where data is limited, against OFG’s own dataset.
For procurement and commissioning professionals, the framework represents a structured, data-led approach to SEND accountability, with the potential to support more consistent reporting across different school types and local authorities.
During the current academic year, OFG has used Progress X to monitor progress for 2,100 pupils, tracking more than 21,000 personalised EHCP-aligned targets. A full group-wide dataset is expected in summer 2026.
OFG has indicated it is sharing its findings with policymakers, with ambitions for Progress X to inform wider sector standards.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
