Mastodon C’s SEND model has been developed for department heads and intelligence professionals who need to accurately plan future special educational needs and disability services (SEND). Together, the SEND model and our support services can provide them with higher confidence levels and greater projection accuracy, allowing them to make the right decisions for the future, by exploring multiple possible strategies and scenarios.
The model creates projections by academic year, need and placement type, and we can predict the total future SEND population of an authority to over 99% accuracy. This is achieved probabilistically, by learning about what has happened in the past and running thousands of simulations of possible futures, based on your local offer and need profile, and your own costs. This type of modelling is time consuming, complex, and requires extensive mathematical expertise to develop, making it economically and practically infeasible for most authorities to do in-house. As public sector data science specialists, we have been able to develop a robust and repeatable mathematical model, that helps to tackle these significant challenges and provide the confidence that local authorities require to support strategic planning and organisational decision making, where important questions need to be answered based on limited historical data.
Read here about the London Borough of Tower Hamlets’ experience of working with us.
The working relationship with Mastodon C has been very positive and productive. It’s helped us understand a lot about data in our organisation and how we can make the best use of it.
Terry Bryan Head of Pupil Services
discover the impact of new send strategiesFor example, explore a scenario where mainstream schools start including more children with moderate learning difficulties. Using the model you would rapidly be able to understand the effects of this on the whole SEND population and your cost profile in future years
explore cost projections and impactProjected SEND demand can be converted into costs, and, in combination with scenarios, allow the cost-benefit analysis of a variety of interventions. Cost are calculated by multiplying average costs in a ‘cost profile’, by projected SEND demand.
be confident in the numbersThe model uses a method that is designed to work well for small numbers, limited historical data, and uncertain outcomes, which is a particular challenge in the SEND service area where a complex range of high-cost need and setting types interact over time.
get started quickly with your real dataMastodon C’s team provides full project support to help you quickly start assessing demand and exploring scenarios, using data we help to extract from your back office systems. Full technical documentation is available on request.
We help your analysts get started with extracting your data, and your leaders with defining the strategic scenarios that you will want to explore. This makes it easy to get going on your SEND strategy, drawing on our experience of working with a number of other authorities who are tackling similar challenges.
Make sure the data from your operational systems and statutory returns is giving you a clear view of what is actually going on in your local area.
Get a detailed view of how your SEND system has been working in the past. Dig into ways of measuring school inclusion.
We provide "baseline" demand and cost projections, as a set of detailed spreadsheets and visualisations, showing your expected 10 year picture if things stay on their current course - giving a realistic picture of where you are right now.
3 additional pieces of work (work packages) which we would mutually agree upon and those would include areas of interest that you’d want us to look into and model.
Stay on top of how your SEND system is working through the year to see if there is anomalous growth or reductions in demand. Test to see if your interventions are working as expected.
Understand how you are performing against your statistical and other neighbours in your SEND system and SEND costs.
Like what you see? Then speak to us about how we can work together with you, our products, and our team.
