Smart Holistic Model for Children and Youth with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

The introduction of the children and families act in 2014 (CFA 2014), claimed to make a significant change to the assessment and support for children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in the UK. As well as enhancing the multi-professional collaboration between education, health and social care services. However, the Department for Education has not produced a national `blueprint' for Education, Health and Care-plan (EHCP) or supporting processes. As it is up to individual pathfinder areas (Local Authorities of different boroughs) to design, pilot and implement their own tools and processes. Therefore, this research addresses an apparent gap between the theoretical approach and the practical implementation of the new SEND code of practice. This research work proposes and develops an innovative generic smart “School Care Coordination System” (SCCS) knowledge-base, based on a holistic six-layered data management model. Which adopts a methodology of ontology engineering so that information is given in a well-defined meaning that translates the given unstructured data into a knowledgeable representation data to bring education, health and social care services into a single application to meet the needs of children and young people with SEND, thus such model can significantly facilitate the cooperative work between the education, health and care provider. The developed model infostructure has solved the huge difficulties schools' are facing on a daily bases. It enabled the coordination of care and integration of information about a child with an EHCP from different departments involved and have received countless attention from all the schools and the local authorities involved with great feedback.

I. Introduction

The status of children and young people (YP) with special educational need (SEN) has been transformed in the past 140 years. Previously institutionalised and deemed ‘ineducable’, most children with SEN were not valued members of their local school's community. Decades of social and legislative changes have resulted in the education of children and YP with SEN becoming a key topic within educational and political debate [1].