Case study
SENDadvisor
A national directory that brings days out, specialist services, schools, Local Offer information, and plain-English EHCP guidance into one calmer, more searchable experience for families of children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) across England.
- My role
- Product strategy, UX design, front-end development, data platform work, and content design. Solo founder/owner across the full stack: from information architecture and visual language through to the enrichment pipeline, moderation tooling, and operational runbooks.
- Year / status
- 2025 · Live product
01 — The challenge
Replace a fragmented system with one calm place.
Families navigating SEND are forced to search across fragmented council pages, specialist provider directories, and scattered community resources — all while already dealing with a stressful, jargon-heavy system. There is no single trustworthy place to discover what's available locally, understand Local Offer obligations, or get plain-English EHCP guidance. Existing directories are either geographically narrow, commercially driven, or structured around council administrative boundaries rather than how families actually look for help.
02 — The approach
Design around family needs, not council structures.
Research: mapped the real user journey by auditing all 153 English local authority Local Offer sites, identifying where families actually land, what jargon blocks them, and where trust signals are missing. Catalogued venue types, service categories, and EHCP pathway language to design a taxonomy around family needs rather than council structures. Information architecture: built location-aware search as the primary surface, with clear category routes for days out, services, and schools. Plain-English EHCP guidance and Local Offer pages sit alongside the directory rather than behind a separate resources silo. Every LA gets a dedicated page with SEND team contacts, Local Offer URL, and EHCP pathway notes. Visual language: Airbnb/TripAdvisor-inspired public site with photo-first cards, horizontal icon filter bars, no sidebar. Accessibility (contrast, keyboard, screen-reader semantics) and trust signals (genuine review counts, moderated Q&A, verified provider claims) are part of the product model, not final-stage checks. Build: Next.js 16 App Router on Cloudflare Workers via OpenNext, D1 as the published projection, R2 for images, KV for cache, Analytics Engine for event telemetry. Auth via NextAuth v5 JWT with Google + Resend. Centralised error handling, standardised error codes, and rate limiting on sensitive endpoints from day one. Data pipeline: built a gatherer → enricher → verifier → publish workflow with a workflow_status state machine that keeps half-finished records off the public site. A local enrichment audit server reviews gathered venue batches before any D1 write. Blocked-site retry escalation runs local-first: Scrapling stealth probe → self-hosted Crawlee worker → cloud Apify fallback. GIAS school data sync (25k open schools) and Ofsted inspection import run against the DfE register. Every pipeline write is logged with source attribution. Operations: Cloudflare Email Routing for public contact aliases. Listmonk digest sync with D1 as the consent source of truth and a retryable outbox. Twenty CRM integration for provider outreach with a native outreach workspace and retryable sync queue. Daily D1 backups to R2 with monthly restore drills.
03 — The outcome
A national service, useful from day one.
11,000+ curated listings across England, all published through a verified pipeline rather than raw scraping. Coverage for all 153 English local authorities — Local Offer URLs, SEND team contacts, EHCP pathway pages. Plain-English EHCP guidance and moderated community reviews in one platform. Live production at sendadvisor.co.uk with full CI/CD on a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner, branch-protected main, and blocking dependency audits. Operational maturity: daily backups with restore drills, analytics pipeline, moderation tooling, claim-verification flow, and an enrichment audit server that keeps human review in the loop before any public write.
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