Badges provide an opportunity to recognise, record and reward achievements for those who have additional support needs or specific barriers when participating in traditional learning or social environments. Badges for SEND provision are an excellent way to turn the smallest steps into big wins by celebrating what individuals can do.

While badges written for broader categories might need to appeal to the widest possible audience or include minimum criteria that all must achieve, this is a space where it is encouraged to tailor badges to small numbers of recipients, or even with specific individuals in mind. For both issuers and recipients, this becomes a valuable asset and provides a route to recognise what really matters to them.

Issuing badges to complement the delivery of SEND provision is a great way to celebrate achievements such as:

• Developing or demonstrating life and social skills
• Displaying a positive attitude
• Achieving a goal 
• Overcoming a challenge

Focus on the achievement. Avoid stating on a badge that the recipient has special educational needs or disabilities, or is only for recipients with special educational needs or disabilities. No matter how positive the intention, labels like this are not always well received. A negative relationship with terminology can cause individuals to be less likely to accept and share their badge.

This badge works as an example of a specific achievement related to life skills. Its alignment to the Skills Builder Universal Framework enables a recipient to learn more about skills in a broader context while celebrating the step they have taken.

This format could be adapted to cover a wide range of activities that are important for daily life, for example, travel and public transport, engaging with arts and culture, or using digital tools.

Want to use this badge? Click the link for an Excel spreadsheet containing all of the badge data, ready to be copied and customised.

To use an exemplar badge and make it your own:

1. Download the spreadsheet and customise to your needs.
2. On your digital badge issuing platform of choice, create a new badge and input the badge data from the spreadsheet.
3. Edit and adapt the data to suit your needs.
4. Publish the badge / make it available for issuing.

While all badges that follow the Open Badge Standard will contain the same core components, different issuing platforms can label and format them differently and often have different approaches to applying settings and attributes to a badge.

Don’t panic – the excel file contains all the information you’ll need to build the badge on your chosen issuing platform (full list of Open Badge platforms) and come readily formatted with instructions for three popular issuing platforms: Open Badge Factory, Navigatr, and Credly.

Consider these badges as templates – it is always recommended to ensure your badges are adapted to your needs and tailored to be relevant to your recipients. This will ensure that your badge is meaningful and valued by those you issue it to.

Examples of customising an exemplar badge to fit your needs could include:

• Expanding on the information to add specific detail about an activity you will issue the badge for.
• Adjusting language to suit your organisation’s brand.
• Adding a location.
• Removing any elements you feel are not relevant to your badge recipients.

The platform examples provided in our exemplar badges are intended to help illustrate how a set of badge data may require adjusting to fit the issuing platform being used. Which badging platform you choose will depend on the on your individual use case and the functionality you require. The Digital Badging Commission does not endorse any particular badging platform. A full list of Open Badge platforms is maintained by 1EdTech.

If you represent an Open Badge platform and would like to be included in our exemplar files, please provide us with an excel sheet containing our exemplar data mapped to your system and we will add you to the download files.