Shirley Walker, project manager for LISA, which has now gone live (Children Now, 29 September-5 October), says the southeast London borough decided to spread the message this way after finding out that giving leaflets to children at school wasn't the most effective way to disseminate information.
"Some schools didn't distribute it as we thought they might have done, and a few parents had contacted schools to ask for more information," she says.
More than a quarter of the 60,000-plus children in Lewisham live in households where both parents are unemployed. "A number of parents will struggle to provide everything children need," explains Walker, who has worked for the council for four and a half years.
She says LISA is there to allow agencies to act before serious problems develop. "It seeks to prevent all the cases that don't need to go to social care and health from getting to them," she says. "We're not talking about terms like risk in a child protection way. It's more things like being at risk of social exclusion, needs not being met, children falling through the net, not attending school, or anti-social behaviour."
She says information sharing has huge time benefits for practitioners.
"They will be able to enter a system and access data in five minutes. They will only be looking at minimal data but the key for a lot of practitioners is to identify who else is involved."
Walker stresses that practitioners will only be allowed to access "limited" data, and that young people and parents will be able to request that sensitive data isn't on the system.
Lewisham's system brings together the expertise from its information sharing and assessment pilot with Ryogens, the generic youth offending technology, and Fame, the framework for multi-agency information sharing and working launched by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.
It is the only local authority to gain trailblazer status for all three initiatives.
Walker says Lewisham's pilot ISA, which ran in Deptford from November 2003 and involved a senior health visitor, social worker, education professional, co-ordinator and administrator, has made it easier for different agencies to work together. "It is a family support model," she says. "We encourage practitioners to sit down with children and their families to create a task-oriented plan then come back together to look at progress."
She admits that it was "very hard" to engage health agencies initially, but adds: "I would have to say it's not because they haven't wanted to be involved. They have, particularly the primary care trust, which is working hard. It's more about legislation creating barriers." The Children Bill, she hopes, will rectify that situation.
The hub of its system is a database holding details of all the children in the borough, and its spokes are the different agencies working with children. Practitioners who log a concern about a child will be able to see if any other agencies are involved in the child's life, but that's all. Children are identified by seven characteristics, including name, date of birth and their GP.
Members of LISA's central team have access to all information, but practitioners don't, although they can use secure email to pass more sensitive information between them.
"Those recognised as children in need will have a record," says Walker, "but it's not really a record because you can't see all the information.
"The key for us is around encouraging practitioners to speak to each other," she concludes. "That's real multi-agency working and that's what we're aiming to achieve."
BACKGROUND
How Lewisham developed LISA
- Seminars brought heads of all the services together
- Established four work streams: technical, looking at systems; legal, to look at information sharing; professional, to deal with day-to-day practitioners; and organisational, looking at umbrella issues
- Created a multi-agency information sharing board that took in ISA, Fame and Ryogens
- Started training practitioners in October 2003.
