Growing children’s services interventions of the future

The CII projects ultimately aim to improve children’s outcomes through innovation, with the use of digital solutions being a key aspect of both of the schemes summarised here:

Data sharing to better understand families in Portsmouth

Portsmouth City Council has changed the way it uses its data and moved to more collaborative partner working in children’s services over the past 18 months.

Portsmouth’s Data Platform went live in March 2022, with the integration of data from more than 40 different systems and partner agencies to create a complete view of their children’s lives and those of their immediate families. This move enabled the council to begin to use data more proactively and share more confidently.

The first service innovation added onto the Data Platform was their Vulnerable Pupil Tracking Portal (VPT). This is a secure online portal, shared with schools. It provides each school with their own data feeds and dashboards, which enables early identification of children who may have additional vulnerabilities.

This allows effective plans of support to be implemented more quickly. Children who are then highlighted as being vulnerable are discussed on a fortnightly basis with their local authority education link coordinator to ensure effective oversight.

The portal allows schools and local authority users to see all information relating to a child in one place, which saves users time from having to look at several databases.

The child’s golden record includes data on attendance, exclusions, exploitation levels, special educational needs and disabilities, and other vulnerability factors, and has information from safeguarding teams and the youth justice service.

Schools are positive about the resource, saying it helps them in their daily work and to keep on top of safeguarding for children. This VPT also now holds early help support plans for the child and family, through online data collection and collaboration of support information against a centralised family support plan. Overview reports and dashboards allow service managers and the Supporting Families Team to access the information to build this into their support work.

Last summer, the Data Platform was extended further to provide fully profiled views of families across the city for the Supporting Families Team, via their own Supporting Families (Phase 3) portal. This portal can automatically identify those families who are eligible for help through the national Supporting Families Programme, as well as families who qualify for successful turnaround status.

Recently, a Neuro Diversity Profiling Portal has been added to the list of services. This provides an online first step in identifying neurodiversity in children and young people (aged 0-19) across the city to help establish what additional support needs or learning difficulties a young person may have.

The Portsmouth Data Platform is also the basis for a data science proof-of-concept project, using machine learning models to look for early signs of a child becoming more at risk of coming into care in the future. The aim is to focus early help support activities as early as possible to prevent crisis, make families stronger, and reduce the number of children being taken into care.

Portsmouth will also complete the implementation of a new portal to give them more immediate understanding of children who are potentially missing, exploited or trafficked, or who are linked to a gang or gang culture.

Hayden Ginns, assistant director for children’s services at Portsmouth City Council and Portsmouth Place (NHS) says: “The new technology has enabled professionals in the city to appropriately (and legally) share vital information about children across agency boundaries.

“Local and national reviews into the safeguarding of children when things go awry nearly always point to a lack of appropriate sharing of information – both in terms of the right information and sharing early enough to prevent harm. This is often a practice issue. But technology can be a major factor in improving how services work together for the benefit of children and families.

“For example, we learnt early on that schools do not always know who a child’s social worker is. Just that simple exchange of information can make a major difference to the quality of safeguarding children.”

Reimagining case management systems in North Yorkshire

North Yorkshire Council is exploring how new technology could help improve children’s services case management to support social workers to keep children safe. The project is being funded by the Department for Education’s Children’s Social Care Digital and Data Solutions Fund and supported by the CII and partners at Microsoft and Simpson Associates.

Local authorities must navigate a mass of data and information as they seek to ensure the children in their care are able to receive the best possible support. This can be complex and time-consuming, taking social workers away from vital time spent with children and families.

North Yorkshire’s case management solution seeks to address these challenges.

Using analytics tools, the system will be able to efficiently search and analyse data and information across different sources and systems so that children’s services providers have immediate and easy access to the key information about a child or family.

The semantic search function can operate across both structured data sources and unstructured data – for example, written case notes or written assessments – and extract the key elements for the user.

The team at North Yorkshire has also targeted the tool towards creating comprehensive genograms and ecomaps, which will provide a map of the important people and places in a child’s life and help identify those who can help to keep a child safe and those who may pose a risk.

This will assist social workers to take better, more proactive decisions to protect local children, and help to keep children connected to their local, community networks. This could have a transformative impact for children going into the care system – for example, by making social workers aware of a neighbour or a family friend who the child knows and trusts and who could provide care to the child for a period of time.

In addition, North Yorkshire is looking at how it can utilise existing smart technology to create systems designed for the social workers of today and the future – for example, exploring the potential for voice notes to become a key part of how practitioners record information about a child.

To create a tool that works for children, families and practitioners, the council has conducted extensive user research to inform development, including garnering an understanding of difficulties with existing case management systems, the key features local authorities would welcome in a case management system and exploring potential cases for the tool both within and beyond children’s social care.

The team has also shared key learning from the project, especially to support other teams to negotiate complexities around data and information sharing.

The team is aiming for a prototype tool to be available in early 2024, which will be piloted with service users and refined according to feedback. The aim is for a revised product to be produced by spring 2024, alongside a guidance framework, evaluation and recommendations paper.

The tool could potentially be used to support those children and young people at transition points, enabling a comprehensive single view of the child and helping services to better understand trends and patterns, and translate these into service improvements.

These are abridged versions of articles in the Coram Innovation Incubator annual report 2023.

Read CYP Now's Special Report on Digital Solutions in Children's Services here.