One child's record
It remembers what works
One child's record, built from what you, their teachers and they themselves notice — and it carries across when they change school.
“Nothing recorded yet”
A subject nobody has assessed reads exactly like that, and never as a gap. Rule 4 of ten.
See the rules
What that means on a Tuesday
A mark book tells you the score. Then the page turns.
Seven out of ten. Next term there is another number, and nothing joins the two up.
This tells you that fractions went wrong twice after a long day. That the two she lost were the two word problems, and the same sums in figures were fine that morning. That it has happened three times since February.
Then it says what to try next, and names the four pieces of work it read to get there. You decide whether it is right. You know her. It does not.
Hence the elephant.
What went wrongThe question, the topic, and the mark it was out of.
What the task was likeA word problem, a page of sums, a piece of reading.
What came before itThe date, the time of day, what else happened that week.
The part that matters in September
It does not start again
Every September there is a new teacher. At eleven there is a new school, and after that a college. Each time, the adults in front of your child begin with a name, a set of grades and whatever the last lot remembered to pass on.
The software the school bought does not carry over, and it was never built to. In law it acts for the school, on the school's instructions, under a contract that ends when your child leaves. That is the correct arrangement and no criticism of anyone.
What you can take out of it today
Most of them will give you an export on the way out: a PDF of the journal, a zip of the photographs. It is accurate on the day it is made, and then it is finished. The next school does not read from it, and neither does anything else. You are keeping a souvenir of a record rather than the record.
What EleMate does with it
The record is yours and stays live. A school is given access to your child while it teaches them, and that access ends when the relationship does — the record does not go with it. So the next teacher opens three years of evidence, and what has already been tried, instead of starting from a name.
The same record, all the way through
Nothing to take on trust
You can check every word of it
Every claim opens onto the records it came from — the assessments, the homework, the notes somebody wrote at the time. You can read them and tell us we have got it wrong.
A finding that cannot name its records is thrown away before it reaches you, and so is one whose references point anywhere except your own child's records. That check runs in the code, after the model has written, because a rule that only appears in a prompt is a request.
AssessmentsThe mark, what it was out of, and the topic it was on.
HomeworkWhat was set, how it went, and when it was done.
NotesWhat you or their teacher wrote down at the time.
The rules
Six of the ten rules it is built to
Each one exists because the failure it prevents is one a family would feel. They are checks in the code that run before you read a word. The other four are about who owns the record.
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A finding is evidence-linked or it does not ship
Every claim cites the assessments, homework, notes and observations it was drawn from, and the app shows them to you. A plausible claim with nothing behind it is the worst thing this could produce: nobody can check it, and they act on it anyway.
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It never diagnoses
No dyslexia, ADHD, autism, dyscalculia, dyspraxia. Not as a label, not as “shows signs of”, and not softened into “you may want to explore whether”. The name of a condition stops the output whatever confidence is wrapped around it.
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It never states a ceiling
Nothing it writes may put a limit on what your child could become — not “low ability”, not “unlikely to succeed at”, not “better suited to something less demanding”. Pathway and career features open doors and never close them.
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Not measured is never a weakness
A subject nobody has assessed reads as “nothing recorded yet”, never as a gap. Reporting a weakness nobody measured is inventing one out of our own missing data.
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Nothing about your child is inferred from another child
No cohort model, no percentile, no ranking, no “children like yours”. A teacher can see their own class, which answers who needs them this week — but that is never an input to what the system says about one child.
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Your child's own view carries no deficit framing
One record, two lenses. You see development areas and the evidence under each; they see what to do next and what has helped. A seven-year-old must never open this and read a list of what is wrong with them, so the server does not send it.
What it will not tell you
It will not decide your child is a visual learner
The idea that a child has a learning style, and does better when teaching is matched to it, has been tested many times and has not held up. It is popular and it sounds kind. We are not willing to sell it to you.
What EleMate has instead is a pattern out of a real record — when something went wrong, what the task looked like, what came immediately before it — and the records that pattern was drawn from, handed to an adult who knows the child far better than the record does.
- It will not label a child with a style, a type, or a category of learner.
- It will not name a condition, however carefully the sentence is hedged.
- It will not say what your child is unlikely to manage.
- It will not compare your child with another one, in your family or anybody else's.
- It will not report a subject nobody has measured as a weakness.
Where this actually is
Being built, and honest about it
The record, the rules and the review are built and tested. It is not open to families yet, and we will not give you a date we cannot keep.
There are no results to show you either. Nobody has used this with a real child, so there is nothing yet about what it changes, and anything we said about that would be a sentence we made up.
Before one real child's data goes in, this needs a data protection impact assessment. Profiling children is named as high risk under the ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code, and this profiles children by design. That, and what we will and will not hold, is set out in full.
Leave us a name and an email address
We will write when there is something real to look at. That is the only thing the address is used for.