Introduction

As a SENCO (Special Educational Needs Coordinator), you’re constantly grappling with vast amounts of qualitative data—incident reports, timelines, specialist recommendations, and more—all crucial for supporting pupils with Social, Emotional, and Mental Health (SEMH) needs. Analysing this data manually is time-consuming and often difficult to synthesise.

But what if you could create an “organisational brain” for every child on your SEND register? This post will walk you through a powerful, central approach to analysing qualitative SEMH data using ChatGPT Projects, dramatically improving how you support pupils with additional needs and inform staff training.

The Power of a ‘Project Only’ Focus

The core of this strategy lies in leveraging ChatGPT Projects to create a dedicated, secure analysis environment for a specific pupil. Think of ChatGPT Projects as a private local LLM.

Setting Up Your Data Analysis Project

1. New Project Creation: Start a new project (e.g., “SEMH Data Analysis for Bruce”).
2. Crucial Setting: Go to Settings and select “Project Only”. This is essential. It instructs the AI to only interrogate and analyse the data you upload, ensuring privacy and focused, relevant results.

What Data Should You Upload?

To build a comprehensive picture, you should upload all relevant qualitative data. For our example, this included:

• Pupil History Timeline: Detailing significant life events or trauma.
• Behaviour Incident Reports: A collection of daily/weekly reports.
• Exclusion Reports: Formal records providing context to behaviour escalation.
• The School/Trust Framework Manual: For example, the Trauma Perspective Practice (TPP) Manual, which provides common language, guidance, and approaches.

By collating this data centrally, you create a single, deep data source that can be interrogated instantly, which is far more efficient than wading through years of individual files [01:05].

Transforming Support: Use Cases for School Staff

The real power of ChatGPT Projects is providing different staff members with instant, tailored information based on their role [03:33].

1. For the New Teaching Assistant (TA)

A new TA needs a quick, comprehensive introduction to the pupil. Instead of reading a dozen documents, they can ask for an overview.

• The Prompt: “Give an overview of this pupil for a new TA who has never worked with him before.”
• The Output: Provides a summary of the pupil’s challenges, directly referencing where the information was sourced (e.g., behaviour reports, history timeline), and offers immediate, TPP-informed recommendations [03:01].

2. For the Class Teacher

Teachers often need instant strategies for planned or unexpected events. A quick query can provide a solution based on the pupil’s history.

• The Scenario: Preparing for sports day, knowing the pupil becomes dysregulated in competitive environments [03:42].
• The Prompt: “How should I manage competitive sports day to prevent dysregulation, based on this data and the TPP manual?”
• The Output: Provides specific, nice approaches and strategies, referencing the TPP language. This resource is available 24/7, meaning the teacher doesn’t have to wait for the SENCO’s availability [04:19].

3. For the Senior Leadership Team (SLT)

The aggregated data from one or (ideally) multiple pupils can become a powerful tool for strategic training decisions.

• The Goal: Prioritise TPP training elements for staff delivery [04:35].
• The Prompt: “Based on the needs and recurring themes in Bruce’s data, which elements of the TPP framework should we prioritise for staff training?”
• The Output: ChatGPT ranks the elements. For instance, it might rank Element Seven: Co-Regulation Stress Distress as number one, and Element Five: Understand Behaviour as number two [04:55]. This ensures your training is highly effective and directly satisfies the identified needs of your pupils and staff [05:10].

The Strategic Advantage: Sharing and Centralisation

As the SENCO, you centrally create this project. By using the Share feature, you can generate a link and send it to any staff member with access to your school’s version of ChatGPT Projects [05:23].

This central creation and decentralised access vision means:

• Every child on the SEND register has their own powerful, automated organisational brain [05:42].
• The data is constantly being ‘reviewed’ and applied every time a question is asked [05:57].

This is a powerful method to ensure consistency, deeply informed support, and targeted professional development across your school.

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About the Author

Enzo Vullo is a passionate educator and specialist in utilising technology to streamline complex workflows within the education sector, with a focus on delivering high-quality, informed support for pupils with additional needs. He is interested in using AI in education to analysing SEMH and SEND data to support pupils with additional needs.