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Challenges
The project aimed to help social workers and children’s services by improving access to information about which services are involved with a child’s family across councils. This lack of accessible information makes it difficult to assess risk and provide appropriate support, leading to inefficient use of time for frontline workers.
Approach
The project was delivered in several stages, starting from 2018 where the councils received funding from the Local Digital programme to support the delivery of the following objectives:
- Beta exploration: Conducting a beta phase to develop a solution that works across multiple councils.
- Agile methodology: Employing agile practices to ensure user needs are met throughout the development process.
- Open-source development: Creating well-documented, open-source code to allow other councils to test and implement the solution.
- User-centric design: Focusing on meeting the needs of frontline workers in children’s services.
Outcomes and benefits
Since completing the project, Stockport has expanded the Family Context tool to include additional datasets like youth offending and school nursing information. This has likely further reduced the time social workers spend on case assessments.
The project’s benefits include:
- Improved safeguarding: Better access to information enhances child safety.
- Coordinated support: Improved service coordination for vulnerable families.
- Time efficiency: Less time spent by frontline workers searching for information.
- Enhanced assessment process: Improved social work assessments.
- Data quality focus: Emphasis on the importance of data quality in children’s services.
- Increased staff satisfaction: Time savings lead to more effective needs assessments and better outcomes for children in care.
Lessons learnt
The tool has been effective for the council, delivering tangible benefits despite limited scaling. Scaling issues reveal that data solutions can’t be fully transferred in local government due to governance and technical barriers. Although precise attribution for success is unclear, the council admits they would have pursued this project eventually. However, it would have taken longer without the enhanced capabilities developed through collaboration with the delivery partner. This indicates the programme offered a valuable jumpstart in their progress.