The contribution to proton helicity from the spins of quarks and gluons at small Bjorken $x$ can be conveniently studied through the small-$x$ helicity evolution. Recently, it has been employed in a global analysis that includes polarized inclusive and semi-inclusive deep-inelastic scattering measurements at small $x$. The analysis demonstrates an excellent agreement between the evolution and the data, but its predictions contain large uncertainties owing to the large number of free parameters in the initial conditions. The latest development aims to mitigate this issue by employing the valence quark model in the polarized proton target in order to replace most of the free parameters in the initial conditions by the physical information from the proton model.