Electronic child record, Essex
Neil Puffett
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
Essex Council has introduced a system to store children and young people's education information on a single system.
- It intends to eventually extend the system to cover health, police and social care records
- There are currently 600 people within the council who have access to the system
ACTION
Essex County Council has established a single electronic record for each child within the authority - stretching from birth through to adulthood - bringing together all the information from different teams across children's services into one place.
The system currently contains information from around 700 sources of data - from spreadsheets, databases, and other records across early years and education services - for children in the county.
"We wanted to go out and procure a single system with a single record for the child to manage their journey more easily," Emma Toublic, head of education information and business systems at Essex Council, says.
"One of the biggest concerns of parents was that they had to tell the same information about their child six or seven times to different services."
The system went live in November 2015, and is managed by Capita as part of a 10-year contract.
"Before the system was introduced we were spending a lot of time sharing information, or not sharing information at all," Toublic says. "This saves us a lot of time."
Toublic explains that the system has a number of advantages. For example, if a child suddenly stops coming to school, their caseworker can work to identify the issues that may be behind it. Knowledge that the child has a history of poor attendance or exclusion, or that there has been an ongoing concern with behaviour in the playground, could help to get them back into the classroom.
With the right information to hand, the caseworker might find details of a problem at home that the child is struggling to cope with or that their family is receiving some additional support from the council. Knowing this could have an impact on the decisions made around what action needs to be taken to re-engage the child in education and prevent them from falling behind in their learning.
Toublic says having access to information about young people within the local authority area can also be valuable in planning resource requirements and budgeting.
Eventually the council wants to extend the system to move beyond early years and education to also cover health, police, and children's social care information.
"That allows you to have a full view of the child," she adds. "If you get that early on enough you can make plans for that child; you know what kind of resources you are going to need."
That would make it similar in scope to the Contactpoint database established by the previous Labour government in the wake of the Victoria Climbié child abuse scandal to improve child protection.
It held the names, ages and addresses of all under-18s on a central computerised database, along with the contact details of their parents, schools and GPs, but was scrapped by the coalition government in 2010.
However, Toublic recognises there are issues to be mindful of when trying to introduce such changes. "One of the biggest barriers is that case workers can be quite precious about the information they hold," she says.
"The biggest hurdle is that people like the way they have always done things. The change management has been quite a big thing for us. We have taken everything that has been done over the past 15 or 20 years and are saying ‘we are going to do this differently now'.
"Some people get on board from day one, others take a while, and some never get on board. You have got to make people understand that it is okay to share information. We have a duty to safeguard the child - and this is about safeguarding the child."
She adds that the council should be using the data to reach out to families that are struggling by offering them help.
"We have got to get better at that sort of thing - it is about moving from being reactive to proactive."
IMPACT
There are now more than 25 council teams using the system, with 600 internal users, 1,300 early years providers, and more than 30,000 parents accessing the system to manage school admissions.
"The end goal for us is a single record for the child which hopefully should happen within the next five years," Toublic says.
