The challenge

Consistent identification and empowering tutors to deliver expert-grade support

Bedford College Group serves thousands of learners across multiple campuses. Like many colleges, they were identifying some learners with additional needs but the harder question was what happened next.

Support planning, delivery and review were inconsistent across departments. Where support did happen, it often depended on specialist teams who could not scale to every learner who needed help. Tutors wanted to do more but lacked the tools, data and structured workflows to deliver personalised support confidently.

When Ofsted introduced the standalone inclusion judgment, the expectation became clear: providers must demonstrate a systematic, whole-provider approach to identifying needs, planning support, delivering it and reviewing impact. Not just for learners with formal diagnoses, but for every learner.

  • Identification processes varied by department with no consistent approach across the college group
  • Learners without formal diagnoses or prior disclosures were not being picked up
  • Support depended heavily on specialist teams who could not reach every learner
  • Tutors had no structured workflow for planning, delivering and evidencing support
  • No auditable evidence trail linking identification through to review

The alternative was to increase our specialist resource fivefold. The trial gave us confidence that Cognassist can deliver what we need to empower our existing tutors to provide high-quality, personalised learning support at a scale that specialist teams alone could never reach.

— Jess Leech, Executive Director of Student Experience & Inclusion, Bedford College Group

The solution

A complete workflow, not just an assessment

Bedford piloted Cognassist across four curriculum areas and three colleges. The trial covered every stage of the inclusion cycle, equipping tutors to deliver the full assess, plan, do and review workflow.

Assess — Consistent identification at scale

Every learner in the pilot completed the same standardised cognitive assessment. This replaced inconsistent, department-level processes with a single evidence-based system that surfaces learning needs across the entire cohort, including learners with no prior diagnosis.

Plan — Personalised support plans built from data

Assessment results feed directly into personalised support plans, co-created between tutor and learner. Tutors receive clear, actionable recommendations grounded in cognitive data rather than guesswork. No specialist qualification required to create or deliver the plan.

Do — Tutor-led support without specialist dependency

The platform equips tutors to deliver personalised learning support as part of their everyday teaching. Learners who would previously have waited for specialist referral receive proactive, structured support from the person who knows them best.

Review — Evidenced impact across the provision

Every interaction is recorded, creating an auditable evidence trail from identification through to review. Leadership dashboards give real-time visibility across departments, providing the institutional-level evidence Ofsted expects.

Built on independently validated assessment

Every support plan, funding claim and inspection evidence trail in the workflow above starts with the cognitive assessment. Ofsted expects identification to be “early and accurate.” Under the Equality Act, the assessment itself is a provision that must be fair and validated. If the assessment data is unreliable, the support built on it cannot be evidenced with confidence and the institution’s legal and regulatory position is exposed. For Bedford, independent validation means they can build their entire inclusion strategy on assessment data they trust.

The Cognassist cognitive assessment is independently validated by PATOSS and compliant with the scientific validity requirements of JCQ. Results are accepted by most awarding organisations for access arrangements and reasonable adjustments, and the assessment is calibrated against a normative sample of over 26,000 UK FE learners.

Why it works

Empowering every tutor to deliver personalised support

Most colleges face the same constraint: specialist teams cannot scale to support every learner who needs help. The traditional model creates a bottleneck where identification outpaces capacity to act.

Cognassist shifts this model. The platform provides tutors with the insight, structure and guided workflows to deliver personalised support directly. Learners receive the right support from the person who knows their learning context best, without the cost, logistics or wait times of routing every case through specialist services.

  • Tutors receive clear, data-driven recommendations specific to each learner
  • Guided workflows mean no specialist training is required to plan or deliver support
  • Specialist teams are freed to focus on the most complex cases
  • Every support action is automatically evidenced for Ofsted and funding compliance

The trial has demonstrated that Cognassist has the ability to work effectively at an institutional scale, the results we’ve seen have given us the confidence to commit to a full rollout to every learner from September

— Yiannis Koursis, CEO, Bedford College Group

What happens next

From pilot to every learner in September 2026

Bedford’s three-month pilot gave them the evidence that the full inclusion workflow works across departments and colleges. They are now preparing to launch Cognassist across their entire provision from September 2026, giving every learner access to consistent, evidence-based identification and support from day one.