Best Evidence for Learning Alternatives for UK Schools (2026)

In short: if you are looking for an Evidence for Learning alternative because you need a broader special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) management platform, start with a direct category alternative such as MeritDocs. If what you actually want is better daily evidence capture, Evidence for Learning is already one of the strongest specialist options and swapping it may not help.

These are different buying centres, not proof that a school needs two systems. Rich evidence capture answers "what did this pupil do, and when". A whole SEND management platform also needs to manage provision, cost, plans, pupil passports, reviews, reports and migration. The decision is whether the school needs more multimedia capture, a broader provision workflow, or both.

This page compares the realistic options for UK schools, says clearly where a detail is not publicly stated rather than guessing, and sets out what to test before you move anything.

First, what does "Evidence for Learning" mean here?

Evidence for Learning is a specialist SEND evidence and assessment platform. Its official site describes rich photo and video evidence linked to learning goals and frameworks, custom assessment criteria, individual learning plans, Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), progression frameworks and accreditation, assessment books, learning journeys, family sharing, multi-agency collaboration, and filters and tags.

One quick clarification, because it causes real procurement confusion: Evidence Me is a separate product from a different supplier. If a colleague forwards a comparison, check which product it is actually about before drawing conclusions.

On scale, the supplier's webinar material states use in more than 700 specialist SEND schools, colleges and specialist resource provisions, plus hundreds of mainstream schools, and the home page states more than 75,000 practitioners. Those are vendor-reported figures rather than independently audited ones. The Google Play listing for the staff companion app shows 1,000 or more downloads, and the family app previously showed 10,000 or more and was updated in February 2026. Treat app download bands as directional adoption evidence, not a school count.

For England, the practice reference point is the SEND Code of Practice, not a supplier's compliance claim. Wales runs an additional learning needs framework with individual development plans, Scotland uses additional support for learning, and Northern Ireland has its own SEN framework. Ask any supplier what it supports for your nation rather than assuming English terminology transfers.

Evidence for Learning alternatives at a glance

The pattern across this market is consistent. Storing, tagging and reporting SEND information is well covered. Drafting the document itself, and moving legacy documents in safely, is much less commonly presented as a core capability.

Rich evidence versus finished SEND documents

This is the distinction that decides the purchase, so it is worth being blunt about it.

Evidence capture is about volume and immediacy. A teaching assistant records a short video, tags it to a target, and a family sees progress the same week. Done well, it is genuinely valuable in specialist settings, and it is what Evidence for Learning is built around.

Document work is about a small number of high-stakes artefacts. A SEN Support Plan or profound and multiple learning difficulties (PMLD) Support Plan that a supply teacher can read in three minutes. An annual review that links back to a baseline instead of starting from a blank page. A version history that shows what changed and who approved it. A clean export when a pupil transfers.

Evidence does not automatically become a document. Somebody still reads across the evidence, decides what matters, writes it in the school's format, gets it approved and files it. That is where most special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) evening work goes.

To be fair to Evidence for Learning: it does support individual learning plans, EHCP-linked targets and progression frameworks, so this is not a claim that it produces no documents. The point is narrower. In the public offer reviewed, the centre of gravity is evidence, assessment, learning journeys and family sharing. Structured document drafting and controlled migration of legacy documents are not stated as the core offer.

1. MeritDocs: best for whole SEND provision management with artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted authoring

MeritDocs is a whole SEND provision-management platform rather than a capture app. It covers costed provision mapping, pupil passports, plans, reviews, reporting and migration, with AI-assisted authoring as a differentiator.

Every customer can start with a 28-day free trial, using the school's own cohort and documents before choosing a paid licence.

The Document Wizard helps staff turn recorded pupil information into structured UK SEN Support Plans and PMLD Support Plans. Staff review and approve the output. Structured needs extraction is designed to preserve pupil, parent, staff and professional-report voice without adding unsupported inference, and it does not diagnose.

Batch import accepts legacy Portable Document Format files (PDFs), DOCX files and images, maps source material into a consistent structure, and shows warnings, confidence signals and unmapped content before anything is confirmed. Nobody should promise perfect imports here. SEND formats vary by school and by local authority, and the honest version of migration is "mapped, flagged and checked by a human".

The Documents Hub then keeps documents, versions, assignments, review context and lifecycle state in a governed workflow, with filtering by pupil, visible current versions and review dates, and export. A review version can be linked to a previous baseline, which is what makes an annual review read as a continuation rather than a new file with a new date.

The published data-protection position is a documented Data Protection Act (DPA), Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) support, encryption, UK and European Union (EU) processing, EU zero-retention AI drafting, no training on pupil data, role controls, two-factor authentication (2FA), single sign-on (SSO), audit logs, and export and deletion on exit. That is a set of controls rather than a statutory compliance guarantee, which no supplier can honestly offer. The security page is the summary a Data Protection Officers (DPOs) usually asks for first.

Document import, pupil-data import and Google Workspace sign-in are live. Other management information system (MIS) connections are listed with their current status on the integrations page.

Background reading on the underlying workload problem: how SENCO software should reduce paperwork without losing accuracy.

Best for: specialist and mainstream schools that want one managed SEND provision workflow for mapping, passports, plans, reviews, reporting and migration, while keeping rich evidence capture where it is genuinely needed.

See pricing or review the security and data controls.

2. Evidence for Learning: best for rich evidence and family sharing

Evidence for Learning remains the reference point for specialist evidence capture, and this comparison is not an argument that it is a weak product.

Its public offer covers photo and video evidence linked to goals and frameworks, custom assessment criteria, individual learning plans, EHCPs, progression frameworks and accreditation, assessment books, learning journeys, family sharing, multi-agency collaboration, and filtering and tagging. For a PMLD or complex-needs cohort where progress is lateral and hard to express in numbers, that model fits the reality of the classroom better than most assessment systems.

One procurement point deserves attention rather than alarm. The developer-provided data-safety label on Google Play states that data is encrypted in transit, that no data is shared with third parties, that personal information including photos and videos may be collected, and that data cannot be deleted. That is a platform-store disclosure about the app listing. It is not evidence of an organisational failure, and school contracts frequently set out deletion and retention terms that a store label does not reflect. The practical step is to ask for the contract-level retention, deletion and export terms in writing and read them against your own retention schedule.

Best for: specialist schools, colleges and resource provisions where daily multimedia evidence and family engagement are the core requirement.

3. Tes Provision Map: best for established provision mapping

Tes Provision Map covers learning plans, pupil passports, targets, interventions, reports, reminders and transition between settings. It is the long-standing category product and many SENCOs already know the workflow.

Verified reviews on EdTech Impact praise centralisation and staff visibility while also mentioning setup effort, training and manual authoring. That is qualitative reviewer feedback, not a prevalence study. The live page asks schools to request a quote, so avoid relying on older third-party price figures. A fuller breakdown sits in the Tes Provision Map alternatives guide.

Best for: schools whose gap is provision mapping, targets and intervention tracking rather than evidence capture.

4. Arbor: best for schools that want SEND inside the MIS

Arbor is a broad cloud MIS with a dedicated special-school product for special schools, alternative provision and pupil referral units (PRUs). Its page states flexible interventions, custom assessment frameworks, automated reporting, comprehensive profiles, integrated care plans, trend analysis, parent access, permissioned data, Arbor Workflows and EHCP filing, along with claims of 12,000 schools migrated and 99% customer training satisfaction. Those last two are vendor claims.

Arbor's own support material also documents constraints worth knowing before a demo: the EHCP annual review workflow can collect data and save the outcome and notes back to Arbor; Workflows are stated as included in the newest packages or available as an add-on; schools cannot add SEN or ALN needs outside the supplied statutory list; EHCP and top-up funding are not automatically linked; and recording SENDiF requires a user-defined field.

If you are weighing this option seriously, the Arbor alternatives guide goes further into when a MIS is and is not the right home for SEND work.

Best for: schools already committed to a single whole-school system and willing to configure SEND inside it.

5. Bromcom: best for a MIS-led SEND overview

Bromcom is the other large UK MIS most schools shortlist. Its SEN Dashboard documentation describes SEN status and category, active provisions, EHCPs, events and upcoming SEN reviews, with filtering, export and print.

That gives leaders a clear operational view of the register and what is due. Drafting plans from evidence and importing varied legacy SEND documents are not presented in the documentation reviewed, so ask for both explicitly.

Best for: schools that want the SEND overview to live in the same system as attendance, assessment and reporting.

6. CPOMS: best for safeguarding and pastoral chronologies

CPOMS covers safeguarding, wellbeing and pastoral records, chronologies, data visualisation and cross-setting collaboration. Much of the context that surrounds a SEND plan lives in exactly these records.

It is not a provision-mapping or document-drafting product and does not present itself as one. Treat it as the chronology layer that sits beside a SEND workflow.

Best for: schools that need safeguarding and pastoral chronologies alongside, not instead of, SEND documentation.

What specialist schools should test

Specialist settings have requirements that mainstream comparison lists tend to skip. Test these specifically:

• Lateral progress. Can the system express small-steps progress without forcing an inappropriate age-related framework?
• Multi-professional input. Can therapy, health and social care contributions sit in the record in their own words?
• Care and medical context. Where do care plans, risk assessments and moving-and-handling notes live?
• Staffing reality. Can a teaching assistant record something on a phone in a classroom without a training session?
• Media volume. What happens to storage, retention and export when a cohort produces years of photo and video?
• Handover. Can you produce a usable document for a new class team, a supply teacher or a transition to a new setting?
• Annual review. Does the review link to the previous baseline, or start blank?

Migration and data checks

Evidence platforms accumulate large volumes of media, and media is the part that migrates badly. Before agreeing anything:

1. Ask exactly what an export contains: structured records, media files, tags, timestamps, author names and comments.
2. Ask for a sample export from a real class, not a screenshot.
3. Check whether media exports keep their link to the target or goal, or arrive as a folder of unlabelled files.
4. Confirm retention, deletion and export terms in the contract, not from a store listing or a marketing page.
5. Confirm who owns the content and any parent-shared material.
6. Check what happens to family app access during and after a transition.
7. Agree the storage cost and location of your archive if you keep historic evidence outside the new system.
8. Decide what you genuinely need to migrate. Not every photo from three years ago needs to move.

A short switching checklist

1. Confirm the renewal date and notice period in writing.
2. Define the problem you are solving in one sentence, and test only that.
3. Request a full export before committing to any replacement.
4. Pilot three to five real pupils, including one with a complex profile.
5. Check dates, versions, authorship, attachments and voice after import.
6. Run both systems in parallel for a short, fixed period.
7. Name the person who signs off that migrated records are accurate.
8. Train by role, not with one all-staff demonstration.
9. Tell families what is changing if a family-facing app is involved.
10. Get export, deletion, support and pricing terms in the contract.

Frequently asked questions

Is Evidence for Learning a bad product?

No. It is a strong specialist platform for evidence capture, assessment and family sharing. The question is whether that is the problem you are trying to solve.

Can we keep Evidence for Learning and add a document platform?

Yes, and many specialist schools should. Keep capture where it works and add a document layer for plan drafting, versioning and review. Duplication is only a problem if both systems claim to hold the current plan.

If we run both, which one holds the current plan?

Decide this explicitly on day one and write it down. One system should be the single source of the approved current document; the other holds the evidence behind it.

Will a document platform replace our assessment framework?

No. Assessment frameworks and progression tracking are a separate job. A document platform structures and governs the plan, it does not score progress.

Is Evidence Me the same product?

No. Evidence Me is a separate product from a different supplier and should not be confused with Evidence for Learning when comparing options.

How reliable are the 700 schools and 75,000 practitioners figures?

They are vendor-reported figures from the supplier's own site and webinar material. They are useful context for scale, not independently audited numbers.

What about the app download counts?

Google Play shows broad bands rather than exact figures, and downloads include personal devices, reinstalls and family users. Treat them as directional, not as a school count.

Should the Play Store data-safety label worry us?

Not on its own. The developer-provided label states encryption in transit, no sharing with third parties, and that data cannot be deleted, but that is a store disclosure about an app listing. Ask for contract-level retention, deletion and export terms and assess those.

What can we migrate out of an evidence platform?

That depends entirely on the export format, which is why you should request a sample export before signing anything new. Structured records usually travel more cleanly than media and tags.

Can old photos and videos be imported into a document platform?

Batch import accepts PDFs, DOCX files and images and maps them into a consistent structure with warnings and unmapped content shown. It is designed for documents rather than as a media archive, so plan a separate home for bulk video.

Will staff have to rewrite existing plans?

No. Existing plans can be imported and mapped, then checked. Because SEND formats vary between schools and local authorities, expect a review step rather than a perfect automatic conversion.

Does it work with our MIS?

Document import, pupil-data import and Google Workspace sign-in are live. Other MIS connections are listed with their current status on the integrations page, so check there rather than assuming.

Do we need an MIS connection before starting?

No. Import pupil data, agree how often the register is refreshed, and treat a live connection as an improvement rather than a blocker.

What does it cost?

Public pricing starts at £75 per school per month billed annually, with a 10% multi-academy trust (MAT) discount. Every customer can start with a 28-day free trial before choosing a paid licence. Confirm the current quote, since pricing can depend on school context. See pricing.

Why do so many rows in the table say "Quote"?

Because those suppliers do not publish a standard price in the pages reviewed. Repeating an out-of-date third-party figure would be less useful than stating the gap.

Is a specialist school better off with a MIS module?

Sometimes. If SEND records are the only gap and the MIS already covers them adequately, configure what you have. If document authoring and migration are the bottleneck, a module inside a MIS rarely solves it.

What security evidence should we request?

The DPA, DPIA support, hosting and processing locations, sub-processors, retention and deletion terms, encryption approach, role controls, 2FA and SSO, audit logging and an export route on exit. Ask every supplier the same list and compare written answers.

Is pupil data used to train AI models?

Not in MeritDocs. Drafting runs in the EU under zero-retention terms and pupil data is not used for model training. Ask other suppliers directly, because policies differ.

Does AI decide anything about a pupil?

No. Drafting is tied to recorded information and staff review and approve every output. Nothing here produces a diagnosis or replaces professional judgement.

What about accessibility?

Ask for an accessibility statement and any conformance evidence, then test with the assistive technology your staff and families actually use. Specialist settings should test this harder than most.

How do we get staff to adopt it?

Choose the smallest change that removes a real task, train by role, and check after a term whether documents are quicker to produce and easier to find. Adoption follows saved time, not feature count.

Can we export our documents at any time?

Yes. Documents can be exported from the Documents Hub. For any supplier, test the export before signing rather than after.

What happens if we leave later?

Export and deletion on exit are part of the published data-protection position and should be written into the contract. Ask for confirmation of deletion in writing.

Does any of this change outside England?

The document workflow transfers, but the statutory framework and terminology do not. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland each run their own SEND or ALN framework, so confirm supported formats for your nation.

Should we wait for SEND reform before changing anything?

Reform is not a reason to leave current pupils with unusable plans. Choose tools whose documents export cleanly so a format change is a task rather than a crisis.

The short recommendation

Evidence for Learning is a serious specialist platform, and if daily evidence capture, assessment and family sharing are your priority it is difficult to better. Schools should not switch away from something that works for the sake of consolidation.

The alternative worth testing is a broader SEND management platform, and the trigger is specific: staff are spending evenings reconciling provision, rewriting plans, updating passports, chasing reviews and rebuilding reports from scattered records. MeritDocs is built to compete for that whole workflow, including costed provision mapping, pupil passports, plans, reviews, reporting, migration and AI-assisted authoring. It can replace fragmented tools where the school wants one leaner system, rather than adding another sideline product.

Tes Provision Map remains sensible for provision mapping, Arbor and Bromcom for schools that want SEND inside the MIS, and CPOMS for safeguarding chronologies. Whichever way you go, test one real pupil from evidence through to an approved, exported document before signing anything.

Talk to the team

Request a demo, ask about migration from an evidence platform, or work out what a sensible split between capture and documents looks like in your setting. This goes straight to the team. We reply within one working day.

Tell us about your setting

Prefer email?

Demo and sales enquiries reach the team: contact@meritdocs.com

Sending this to your DPO?

The security page covers the questions DPOs usually ask first, with the full technical detail available on request.

Sources and method

This is a maintained comparison page. Competitor product pages, documentation and platform-store listings are used only to describe what those suppliers publicly offer or disclose. They are not used to support claims about MeritDocs, the wider SEND software market, workload prevalence, comparative security or unstated weaknesses. Vendor-reported figures are labelled as such. Where a detail was not publicly stated in the sources reviewed, this page says so rather than claiming a product cannot do something.

MeritDocs product, pricing and security statements come from current first-party pages and approved product and data-protection documentation. The Google Play data-safety information is developer-provided and describes an app listing, so it is presented as a procurement question to verify in the contract rather than as evidence about an organisation. No independent review score is quoted for Evidence for Learning, because none was available in the sources reviewed. No review or forum wording is reproduced verbatim.

Sources reviewed for this page:

• Evidence for Learning, including its official webinar material on sector reach
• Evidence for Learning staff app on Google Play
• Evidence for Learning family app on Google Play
• Tes Provision Map
• EdTech Impact: Provision Map reviews and product information
• Arbor and Arbor special school MIS
• Arbor support: student profile SEN and ALN FAQs
• Bromcom and the Bromcom SEN Dashboard documentation
• CPOMS
• SEND Code of Practice: 0 to 25 years
• MeritDocs pricing, security, integrations and contact pages

Sources

Evidence for Learning

SEND Code of Practice

Tes Provision Map

EdTech Impact

Arbor

special-school product

Bromcom

SEN Dashboard documentation

CPOMS

Evidence for Learning staff app on Google Play

Evidence for Learning family app on Google Play

Arbor support: student profile SEN and ALN FAQs