Lighthouse Futures Trust — Leeds, United Kingdom

At a glance

• Setting: Specialist supported internship provider for young adults with SEND, 18 to 25
• PAES in place since: 2023
• Intake: Multi-cohort, full academic year
• Role in the program: Core assessment backbone of the supported internship pathway

The challenge

Lighthouse was founded to do one thing well: get young adults with SEND into real, sustained paid work. That meant they needed an assessment that would stand up to two audiences at once. Employers wanted evidence they could trust before they would host an intern. Parents and young people wanted a conversation that started with strengths rather than deficits. Standard transition assessments, even the well-regarded ones, produced profiles heavy on limitation and light on demonstrable capability. They described what the young person could not do. They did not make the case for why they should be given a chance.

Lighthouse needed a tool that evidenced capability. Not aspiration, not potential, but what the young person could demonstrably perform, to a standard, repeatedly, in conditions close to real work.

The implementation

Lighthouse installed a full PAES Lab in Leeds, configured across all five vocational areas. Supervisors completed PAES certification with support from the PAES Productions team. Tasks were localized where needed: metric measurement, UK electrical fittings, sterling in the Business and Marketing area.

The Lab runs multiple sessions per week across the academic year. Cohorts rotate through the five areas. Supervisors score in real time using the PAES Scan app. Outputs feed directly into Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) annual reviews and into the preparation-for-adulthood outcomes that Ofsted inspects specialist provision against.

The supported internship pathway is built around PAES: the assessment identifies strengths, the pathway matches those strengths to employer placements, and the EHCP review cycle tracks progression.

The outcome

For young adults: The shift is the conversation they have about themselves. Instead of arriving at an internship interview carrying a list of diagnoses, they arrive with evidence of what they have done and how well they have done it. Lighthouse reports that young adults speak differently about themselves once PAES data is in their hands.

For supervisors: The Lighthouse team has an assessment with peer-reviewed validation (Educational Measurement, Issues and Practice, 1999). That matters when external inspectors, commissioners, or families ask how decisions are being made. It is not one educator's professional judgement under pressure. It is observed performance, scored against validated criteria.

For employers: The third audience PAES speaks to is the employer host. Employers receive a strengths profile that describes the tasks a young adult has performed and the conditions under which they performed them. It is specific enough to design a real role around, not a work-experience placement.

For the program: PAES sits inside the evidence base that supports commissioning conversations, Ofsted inspections, EHCP compliance, and family confidence in the pathway. It is one assessment doing work that would otherwise require several less-defensible ones.

What's next

Lighthouse is exploring how PAES could scale to serve a broader network of specialist providers across northern England, and how the data could feed a sector-level evidence base for supported internships in the UK. Early conversations with other SEND providers and local authorities are underway.