CATE UK is a resource for anyone interested in assistance dogs, whether they be a disabled person or a member if the general public.

CATE UK was built in response to two issues.

The first was to aid with helping people who were asking questions on social media, particularly disabled people looking to get an assistance dog. The lack of available resources meant that there wasn’t an easy way to get answers to the questions they had. Additionally, there was no easy way to find out what assistance dog organisations and training providers were available which was a noticeable issue. Originally, the training provider list was a table in a document which was used as a resource to respond to queries about what service were available and was later adapted into the first publicly available list.

The second issue was how easy misinformation spread around assistance dogs. This was particularly noticeable with the use of registered or guide dogs only by service providers and also within the community such as the confusion around the ISO proposal.

CATE UK has been developed as a website from early 2021, with the first few iterations of the site being in homemade code. In the first few versions it was made with html with Javascript elements and W3.CSS before moving over to Bootstrap 3.4.1. The original Github project has over 960 commits! In April 2022 the site begun it’s transfer over to WordPress where it was rebuilt with their website builder.

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The name CATE UK stands for Canine Access To Education UK. The name was recycled from a project around university policies which was cancelled due to being unsustainable.

The project was created by Millie Gee. Millie is a disabled young person who is autistic and has other disabilities such as fibromyalgia. Their special interests unsurprisingly includes assistance dogs and they have an washed assistance dog called Reggie. He is the goldador who you see throughout the site.