Blog
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Analysing special educational needs and disability: strategic engagement from the beginning
To complement our core special educational needs and disability (SEND) modelling service, we can provide additional strategic advice and support. In this post Chris Owen, our education and children’s services associate, describes how a facilitated workshop with your SEND strategic leaders can help to clarify your priorities and prepare the ground for strategic planning informed […]
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Mastodon C’s purpose and direction
Mastodon C builds tools that enable people who plan for Special Education, Alternative Provision, and Children’s Social Care to design services that deliver better outcomes for children and young people, while making the best use of the resources available. The people we work with are already experts in delivering these services and we enable them […]
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Moving on
As of 28 May, I’ve officially stepped down as CEO and Director of Mastodon C, the company that Bruce and I founded together 7 years ago. Bruce will be taking over as CEO, to lead the company into the future and to make sure it continues using data to make the world better. It’s been […]
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We’re Hiring a Data Scientist, Remote Friendly, £45,000 – £50,000
We’re looking for a statistical modeller/data scientist to help us develop existing and new models in our Witan model suite including, our existing Special Education projection model and our upcoming Alternative Provision, Children’s Social Care and Adult Social Care models. More details are below. Who we are Mastodon C are a data science company dedicated […]
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Tackling the additional SEND pressures from new court rulings
Two recent articles in The Independent highlighted the increasing trend for Local Authorities to be challenged by the courts to justify the way they fund and manage their SEND provision. This made us here at Mastodon C think about ways in which our Witan SEND model can be used to help authorities when judgements are […]
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Utilising Open SEN2 data with our Witan SEND Model
Since our release of Version 1.0 of our SEND model back at the beginning of the year, we’ve been hard at work looking at other places we can apply our model. One of Mastodon C’s core principles is being open source, and so we turned to open data! Our full model takes a local […]
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The top three SEND policy scenarios
In our recent work with UK local authorities using our SEND model to support their understanding of future demand, and setting strategies to handle that demand, we have had a lot of conversations about what types of strategies they want to explore. While our initial work is focused on setting an accurate baseline projection, this […]
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We are on Digital Outcomes and Specialists 3!
As we know you all love a bit of procurement news: the new Digital Outcomes and Specialists 3 procurement framework goes live on 1st October, and we’ll be one of the suppliers available on it. Along with G-Cloud 10, this gives our local and central government clients a straightforward way to buy our services using […]
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Why is it hard to project demand for complex public services?
Most of our local government clients have strong in-house analytics and business intelligence teams, who do most of their demand projection and strategy analysis, often making heavy use of Excel, which is a great workhorse tool for many problems. When we start working with them on complex services such as SEND, one of their considerations […]
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Modelling Scenarios with the Witan SEND Model
When developing the Witan SEND model we talked to local authorities (LAs) about what was most important to them when doing projections for their SEND population. One of the things we kept hearing was the need to be able to model “alternative scenarios”. Being able to project the future SEND population and the cost to […]
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