The evidence your reviewers ask for, built as it happens.
Distinction coaches students from Grade 5 upward on real projects they choose, and keeps a dated record of everything they do. Your counselors read it. Your review team can export it. It runs alongside the platforms you already use.
Two ways in, no sign up and no account required.
Nothing here competes with your academic program. It documents what happens around it.
What this is actually for.
Evidence for accreditation and review
Every review cycle asks the same thing: show us evidence of student agency, service, personal development, and progression. Most schools assemble it in a scramble, from memory, from photographs, from teachers who have since left. Distinction produces it continuously instead: dated entries, in the student's own words, attributable to the term they happened in, exportable by student or by year group.
Counseling caseloads that arrive too late
One counselor to a hundred and fifty students, meeting each of them properly from Grade 11, is not a staffing problem you can solve with time management. The constraint is that the file is empty when the relationship starts. A student who arrives with five years of recorded work turns the first three months from excavation into strategy, without adding a single counselor hour.
The years nobody owns
Between the end of primary and the start of university counseling sit four or five years in which almost nothing about who a student is becoming gets recorded anywhere. Schools know it. It is the period that produces the strongest applications and the weakest documentation, and it is the period Distinction was built for.
We are not a careers platform, and we are not trying to be.
If your school runs a university and careers platform, keep it. Distinction sits underneath it and starts years earlier.
What your existing platform does
Course databases, entry requirements, deadlines, applications, transcripts, recommendation workflow, destinations reporting. Distinction does none of this and never will.
What Distinction does
The eight years before that: daily coaching on self chosen projects, and a permanent dated record of what the student actually did, including what went wrong and what they did next.
Why they sit well together
One tool manages the application. The other builds what goes into it. Counselors keep every system they already know, and open a full file instead of an empty one.
The individual record
For each assigned student: projects and milestones with dates, evidence and reflections in their own words, recorded obstacles and what followed, and the adults who observed each stage.
The year group picture
Aggregate reporting across a cohort, with small groups suppressed so no individual is identifiable through a summary.
Evidence you can hand over
Exports built for the people who ask for them: a review team, a counselor, a recommender, a parent.
Every format a school, a counselor, or a family might need is listed on the exports page, with what each contains and who decides what leaves.
Four things we ask for, and will not start without.
- 1The named data controller for your students' records.
- 2A reference to the privacy notice your families have already been given.
- 3Your named safeguarding contact.
- 4Your retention policy, so we know when to stop holding what.
Licenses carry an end date. A student's access is removed automatically when they turn eighteen or leave the school. Read the full position on safety and privacy.
One year group is enough to see whether this works.
Grades 5 and 6
The full arc. By the time university counseling begins, the record covers most of the student's adolescence, and the projects have had years to compound.
Grades 7 and 8
The strongest starting point for most schools. Long enough to build genuine depth before subject choices narrow, early enough that nothing has been lost.
Grades 9 and 10
Still worth doing, with a different first job. The early months recover and date what already happened, while the memory is accurate, then the record starts compounding normally.
Students are enrolled as a cohort by the school, not through dozens of individual signups. Pricing is per cohort and agreed in a conversation, because a class of thirty and a whole secondary school are not the same thing. Every student in the cohort still gets the individual intake, the same half hour of deep questions in their own voice, because the coaching is only as good as what it knows.
Start with the parent evening.
Before any platform conversation, many schools simply invite the talk: a free evening for your parent community on how students build the real, documented work that wins admissions, delivered in person by our founder. No product on stage, no cost to the school.
About the talkWhat it costs
Nothing.
Every student gets the full intake, their own record, fifteen coaching messages a week, and the counselling team gets a dashboard across the year group.
Elite, per student per year.
Unlimited coaching for every student, every export, and the intake conversation run by us rather than typed.
Students can be given the written intake as classwork. One lesson produces a full year group.
Start with a conversation.
Tell us your school, the year group you have in mind, and what your next review cycle is asking you to evidence. We will tell you honestly whether this fits.