Miles Reucroft, Author at CACI

Workforce safety and the role of management

Posted on: 27 June 2023

This might seem obvious, because the role of management in overall workforce output and workforce safety is fundamental. Management decisions are at the forefront of working practices and outcomes. But when it comes to safety critical areas, it’s important to consider the way in which management structures, decision making and overall input can support, enhance and improve best practice.

It’s very easy for complacency to creep into the management of aspects such as workforce safety. Where an excellent safety record is demonstrable, aspects such as verbal and written communications can take a backseat, with a regression in their presence or simply a standing still and relying on old systems to continue working.

This goes beyond meetings and briefings and into more serious areas such as fatigue management. There have been high profile cases of fatigue management protocols not being adhered to in the transport industry, not least when Renown Consultants was fined £450,000 with £300,000 in costs by the Office of Rail and Road following the death of two its workers in a road traffic accident following the conclusion of an unacceptably long shift.

It was a failure of management to properly implement regulations. In road transportation and haulage, drivers are restricted to how many hours they can work consecutively without a break, with further rules around taking at least 11-hours rest consecutively during a given day. Again, management of drivers is investigated where infringements occur, with fines in place for discrepancies.

One of the roles of management is to seek to improve, and safety is no different. Data from CIRAS (Confidential Incident Reporting & Analysis System), which is used by Network Rail to anonymously gather feedback from its workforce, found that in 2019/20 over 60% of respondents felt that health and safety concerns were not taken seriously by management. Furthermore, only 75% said that they had received regular safety briefings.

Those numbers paint a clear picture of the need for improvement. Whilst deaths and serious injury remain low on the UK’s railway network, they do still happen. Ticking every safety box is imperative and that starts at the top.

Why are corners cut with workforce safety?

If we accept the adage that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, then the same is true for workforce safety. A company can put in place structures and guidelines for aspects such as safety briefings as mentioned above, but if the management levels below them are not enacting them, what can be done?

Management structures on the ground face different challenges to those in the office. Works need to be conducted in time-critical circumstances, with every minute counting. It can be tempting, with that sort of pressure, to gloss over safety briefings to a team of experienced engineers and workers. They’ve been doing the job for years without harm befalling them, why would that change now?

There is also the element of human error. People make mistakes. If people are running late, or have made a mistake, then there will be a natural compulsion to make up for that, be it by skipping a briefing or working a bit longer to make up for it.

Improving processes to improve workforce safety

Recording and understanding these errors is part of the management remit. We can see from the ORR’s 2019/20 Rail Safety Report that 41% of major injuries suffered by the rail network’s workforce was a result of a slip or trip. The role of management in these risk factors is in recording and reporting them. Gathering evidence and understanding can help to reduce the likelihood of reoccurrence.

An accident like a slip or a trip can also happen to anyone at any time. When you factor that in against 60% of respondents to CIRAS’s survey stating that they don’t feel that management take health and safety concerns seriously, with 25% not receiving regular safety briefings, it’s clear that the role of management, at least in some circumstances, can be improved.

Elements such as safety briefings are crucial for reinforcing safety best practice. Monitoring that they are happening is equally as important, to ensure that they do.

Utilising workforce management software can greatly help to achieve this. Electronic recording of sessions, via handheld devices on site, allows you to record that briefings have taken place. Where they have not been recorded against a job, workflows can automate alerts to management. Leaving a reliable and transparent evidence trail helps management in understanding why accidents have occurred and if their processes have played a part in them.

Equally, such software can help management retain proper oversight of working hours and shift patterns, ensuring that fatigue management protocols and the like are adhered to.

Whilst the intentions of management decisions are always well meaning, it is vital to underpin them with a robust framework to support decision making and to help reduce the number of accidents that occur.

You can find out more in our white paper, Improving workforce safety across the UK’s rail network, which is free to read here.

Virtual schools – improving outcomes for looked after children

Posted on: 26 June 2023

The personal education plan (PEP) and attendance monitoring of looked after children (LAC) are vital in ensuring that they are being appropriately provisioned for and educated. They are vital components of the virtual schools framework, too. The PEP ensures that their education is on the right track; attendance monitoring provides robust information as to their whereabouts for five days of the week, placed in or out of authority. Such information is important to schools, local authorities, social and care workers and other professionals involved in their journey. Monitoring and provision of the information is the responsibility of the child’s local authority, their corporate parent. But how can this information be seamlessly gathered, recorded and shared across all relevant parties to the ultimate benefit of each child?

Real-time virtual schools monitoring

Having attendance information in real-time is a clear advantage. Where information takes time to filter through, vital intervention opportunities can be lost. In a manual world, where information is discovered twice daily by phoning the school the child attends, the data takes time to filter through the system to reach the decision makers.

Implementing a digital process, with registration data entered at the point of contact by the child’s school, helps local authorities to raise red flags and implement action quickly.

Each local authority will have its own plan of action for looked after children found to not be attending school. How is the point of action reached? With real-time data, actions can be implemented at exactly the right moment. No delays, just a clear understanding of the sequence of events and the next steps.

Equally, monitoring each PEP is crucial in ensuring that each child is receiving the educational opportunities deemed necessary at the outset of their journey. If targets are not being met, it is the role of the corporate parent to step in and find out why.

This can only be done with up to date information. Reducing the manual process of requesting, recording and interpreting the information in each PEP will expedite the process of acting upon it. Having a mechanism to seamlessly share the outcomes with other relevant parties will help them to make informed decisions in relation to the child.

Sharing virtual school information

There are often multiple agencies involved in the journey of a looked after child. It is, therefore, important that the information is made available to them. Any education welfare, social care or youth justice workers will need the information to create their own holistic view of the child and inform their own responses to their story.

Information becoming siloed only acts to the detriment of the child. Technology can certainly help, but it can also hinder. Interoperability of software is important in improving outcomes.

Attendance and PEP data can be useful to other agencies in the same way that information from them can be useful to the corporate parent. Disparate agencies working to the same goal of improving outcomes for vulnerable children will do just that.

Securing virtual school data

Recording attendance and PEP data is one thing, but how will the information be secured and shared? Working with a trusted technology partner is an important part of the process. Ensuring relevant security certificates are achieved and that the process is in place to record and make the data available to relevant colleagues and third parties.

What will this process look like? Handling sensitive data is a complex issue, so breaking through this complexity and making life easy for your school, local authority and associated parties is beneficial. IMPULSE Nexus features accessible portals through which only relevant data is shared with only relevant parties. There are school, parent, professional and provider portals. Data is input once, then can be redacted and shared with others. Rules for what data can be shared with whom are established at the outset and can be altered as necessary as you go, with the ability to manually override.

Background security is an important consideration, too. What if there is a data breach or physical hard drives get damaged? Robust backing up and disaster recovery planning is essential. Selecting a provider that can partner with you on this and provide a robust security framework for your data should be a primary consideration. Opting for a fully managed hosting solution with your software provider can also realise benefits in terms of cost and efficiency, as well as security. Leveraging the security spend of a provider can help to keep your data secure and takes it off your table. It also makes implementing updates much easier, with these done off-premise on your behalf.

Making virtual schools easy with IMPULSE Nexus from CACI

We understand the complexity you and your teams face. Our team is itself made up of former youth workers and experts from the education sector. That’s why we’ve designed IMPULSE Nexus to be modular and interoperable. Our virtual schools module can be used in isolation and plugged into the rest of your software solutions to provide a complete picture. You can use as much or as little of IMPULSE Nexus as you need.

Our Core record enables you to record all PEP and attendance data in one place against a child’s file. When certain criteria aren’t met, e.g. they’ve missed a set number of am/pm attendances, alerts can be raised in the system to notify relevant people. This helps to remove the manual strain in sifting through records or calling schools in search of information. Creating efficiency in the process frees up time to focus on interpreting data and improving their outcomes.

Once the process is established, the data is recorded at source in schools and uploaded in real-time to the children’s records. You can edit and adapt the rules underlining this process as you need going forward. Our team is always on hand to help.

Getting the virtual schools process right is fundamental to improving outcomes for looked after children. Receiving data late, misinterpreting it and missing intervention opportunities make a difficult task and impossible one. Having a system and process in place that facilitates swift and efficient PEP and attendance monitoring will help schools, authorities and children across the UK.

For more information on how IMPULSE Nexus can support virtual school requirements, you can view our IMPULSE Nexus virtual schools fact sheet here.

Youth justice in Wales – giving teams a single view of every child

Posted on: 14 June 2023

Families and their children move around frequently for myriad reasons. How can councils and youth justice teams maintain information relevant on these young people when they have fallen into their services? Each touchpoint with a young person in the youth justice system reveals a bit more about their story – losing that data and that insight costs time and effort. It duplicates work and can further disenfranchise young people and their families. Having a shared record, which is appropriately accessible across local authorities and youth justice teams, can help to join the dots in their stories to from a single, consistent data thread.

Data sharing across disparate systems can be difficult. Technology moves at such a fast pace and budgets don’t always keep pace with the changes. This results in multiple systems being used across different authorities to try and achieve the same goal – improve outcomes for young people in the youth justice system.

Transferring data between youth justice teams

The seamless transfer of data works to the benefit of local authorities, youth justice teams and, most pertinently, young people. When a young person moves location, it is vital that their youth justice data follows them. This helps the team in their new location to understand their story and circumstances, reducing duplication of work from one location to another.

It also facilitates swift and informed decision making. Where a single accessible record has been maintained by relevant professionals associated with the young person’s journey, it makes understanding and interpreting that story far easier for professionals new to it.

There are patterns that can be identified in the data. For example, we can easily demonstrate the profile of young person likely to fall into youth justice services. Looked after children are a good example. The Laming Review, keeping children in care out of trouble, notes that: “As a result of their experiences before entering care, and during care, children in care are at greater risk of entering the youth justice system than their peers. Looked-after children are more likely to be exposed to the risk factors established in research as associated with the onset of youth offending than the general population of children.”

Taking the data held by youth justice teams on looked after children will help them to build out a broader understanding of approaches that work. Approaches that work towards improving their outcomes and also approaches that work in understanding why they’ve ended up in the youth justice system.

The value of data in youth justice

Making this information accessible to other professionals can help with early intervention. The data held by a youth justice service can also be relied upon by other youth justice services to help form understanding from a holistic view of approaches to the issues faced.

Sharing of vital information can be an incredibly time intensive, manual process requiring duplication of data. This leaves the process open to human error and the natural time constraints placed upon already stretched services.

In Wales, this problem has been removed. Each of the 22 youth justice services in Wales now uses ChildView from CACI. This means that young people moving within Wales can have their full case record transferred to their new locality automatically. All data is gathered from ChildView via the data exchange button. Enter the reason for transfer and the system collects all the data and transfers it on. This greatly helps in ensuring that relevant professionals have all the information that they need on a young person in order to advance their journey from a firm base of understanding.

Being able to instantly have all the information on a young person moving to a new locality helps to improve their outcomes. They won’t face duplication of effort in another professional entering their lives asking the same questions as before. Instead, a seamless transfer of their record is facilitated.

A joined-up youth justice approach in Wales

The single system response in Wales makes this data transfer frictionless. It also enables youth offending teams to work in an interoperable fashion, whilst also retaining their independence of approach to this complex work.

Applied learnings are vital in breaking down this complexity. It’s something that we see more clearly with aspects such as children missing education, which is an increasingly prevalent issue. It’s also one that no one has a firm grasp of. Estimates of the number of children missing education in the UK vary from 50,000 to 250,000. This depends on what you read and what your parameters for missing education are. One thing which is clear, however, is that it’s an unacceptably high number whichever lens you view it through. How can this issue be tackled by the authorities tasked with resolving it?

Disjointed and incomplete records only serve to exacerbate the issue. Young people fall through the cracks far too easily and disappear into the ether. Understanding a child’s school patterns is a vital piece of information. Linking education and circumstances to the work of youth justice workers is vital. Establishing this single view, from multiple systems and sources, paints a complete picture.

How ChildView helps

That’s why we’ve made ChildView an interoperable system. One that’s capable of working with and alongside other software to create an overarching picture. Being able to seamlessly transfer data is only part of the picture. Being able to seamlessly receive data is also of utmost importance. A young person’s journey doesn’t end when they move location.

Creating this single view drives insight and understanding that is not just applicable at an individual level, but also across every young person in the youth justice system. Having this single view in Wales will help its 22 local authorities to build a comprehensive understanding of youth offending. What works in tackling the issue, what helps in improving outcomes for each young person? Ultimately it will help in reducing the number of young people in the youth justice system, either as first time or reoffenders. A complete picture improves their safety and wellbeing. It plays a vital role in supporting some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

For more information on how ChildView supports the complex and challenging work of youth justice team, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/childview/

Choosing a technology provider that supports and underpins your business

Posted on: 13 October 2022

Deploying modern technology systems is vital for the growth and prosperity of any modern business. They help to drive efficiency and create transparency, underpinning business growth and operations. Making reporting easy and having a holistic view of your organisation identifies areas of strength and weakness. Deciding on a technology provider, however, is almost the easy part. What happens once the contracts are signed and the technology is implemented?

Post-implementation is the most important step in any relationship. Things change, so keeping pace with that change is vital. There will be staff turnover, new business rules, external pressures and changing targets over time. To meet this challenge, it is vital that your technology can adapt and evolve to suit your changing needs.

A technology partnership

The implementation of a technology solution into your business never really stands still. Once it is adopted, getting the most from your investment is essential. Too often technology is decided on, purchased, implemented and then just left to drift as the initial excitement cedes to apathy. The way to avoid this is to have a longer-term plan that goes beyond just getting the technology live.

How will your teams utilise the technology? What will they gain from it? This is why viewing your technology provider as a partner is so important. Considering how the partnership will play out in future should be part of your roadmap. From implementation to training to ongoing support, it’s a partnership that needs to adapt and evolve over time.

Change is inevitable in any business. Your needs and requirements will shift over time, meaning that your technology infrastructure will need to be agile to your demands. Working with a technology partner that understands your business helps to facilitate the evolution of a solution.

Interoperability

Aspects such as interoperability also need to be considered. A ring fenced or unopen software solution will be unable to work with other systems that you currently use. Perhaps more pertinently, it will be unable to work with other systems that you may wish to use in the future. By working with open architecture solutions, you can get your technology solutions to work with one another to deliver a holistic solution to your requirements.

This has the added element of creating efficiency. Where systems can interact and work together, it reduces manual efforts in aspects such as reporting, since data can be gathered seamlessly from multiple sources.

Again, making a technology provider a partner means that you can develop a future roadmap of implementations with them. They can also provide help and support in developing links between their software and others that you would like to include in your technology ecosystem.

FUSION

A clear roadmap towards success helps both parties and all individuals involved in understanding what they need to input to a project such as implementing new technology. At CACI, we developed our FUSION delivery methodology to help not only your team in successfully delivering a project, but also ours in getting to understand your bespoke needs and how we can deliver a solution tailored to them.

This helps to keeps minds focussed and provide an evidence trail of desired outcomes. Post-implementation, we understand that business needs evolve. It’s therefore vital that we provide ongoing assistance to keep your investment in our technology relevant to deliver a return on it.

Ongoing assistance scheme

As part of our partnership with you, CACI deploys an ongoing assistance scheme (OAS) to book in and guarantee time between our team and yours. This helps to support ongoing development of your deployment of our software. It is also useful for completing ad hoc tasks and can cover knowledge gaps at points such as staff turnover. Our team can step in to fulfil roles, for example setting up and establishing reports, helping to take the strain off certain tasks.

The OAS days work really well for us in our ongoing use and development of Cygnum. It guarantees us time with CACI to focus on enhancing how we utilise the system. The consistency of the support makes it very easy to plan around and our point of contact, Odette, is really knowledgeable on both Cygnum and our operational needs, so it’s something that’s really beneficial for us. Odette feels like an extension of our team within CACI – we have a great relationship and it adds value to how we use Cygnum.” Norfolk First Response, Norfolk County Council

Our OAS days are designed to be flexible in terms of delivery and scope. Being booked in advance, they are offered at a discounted rate. Block booking them upfront also means that the procurement process is negated. When you need support, our team is on hand.

Using OAS days to scope future requirements is a vital step towards our customers continuing to get the most from our technology. In effect, our team members become part of your team, understanding your bespoke requirements and mapping out how we can support them.

Not only does this deliver ongoing customer success with our technology, it also aligns our strategy to yours. With a more intimate knowledge and understanding of how your business works and what your team needs to achieve, CACI can be a proactive partner.

Modern technology sits at the heart of any business. Selecting a technology provider is one thing, understanding how they can partner with you is another. Investing in technology is an expensive process, in terms of price, but also time. Getting the most from that investment will determine the success or otherwise of it. Partnering with the right provider is fundamental to realising the objectives your business needs.

For more info on Cygnum, please visit https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Why choosing a hosting service can benefit your youth justice services

Posted on: 9 May 2022

Data hosting isn’t the most interesting, or even the most relevant, topic of conversation for youth justice workers. Yet it plays a vital role in underpinning the processes that youth justice teams implement in working towards their ultimate goal: improving outcomes for young people. So, we wanted to take a couple of minutes to look at why data hosting is so important for youth justice workers and teams.

Security

First and foremost, securing your data is paramount. As we’ve seen recently with Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council and Hackney Council, the cost of losing data can be huge. Both councils fell victim to ransomware attacks, costing both significant sums of money and majorly disrupting their services. While bills ran into the millions, the disruption also affected vital service delivery, including those to vulnerable young people.

Having your data securely backed up at regular intervals helps to minimise the effects of a hack, or even something like a natural disaster. The process is designed to cover the worst-case scenario.

Cost efficiency

By utilising an external hosting service, you are also leveraging their security spend. Keeping data safe inhouse is a hugely expensive process. Microsoft, for example, spends well over £1bn every year on security. Tapping into that spend helps to reduce your costs.

Such organisations are always updating and testing their infrastructure, too. The reputational damage to a company such as Microsoft or Amazon Web Services would be vast if a successful attack was carried out against them. It’s in their best interests to keep everyone’s data secure.

In utilising a fully managed hosting solution, youth justice teams can switch the expense of hosting from a capital expenditure to an operational expenditure. This frees up funds that can be diverted to frontline resources; improving outcomes for the young people in your service.

Flexibility

It also keeps you fully in control of your data and how it is used. Permissions can be tightly controlled and the flow of information likewise. This is important in ensuring that your data is only accessed by the right people, at the right time.

This helps to keep your services running during times of strain. When something like a global pandemic occurs, and everyone is suddenly forced away from the office, keeping your service joined up is vital. A single point of access helps with this, maintaining the provision of requisite data to your team to enable your services to continue running.

You also have control over how regularly your data is backed up, according to the needs of your youth justice team. This offers increased flexibility over the cost, too.

Peace of mind

So, let’s imagine the worst-case scenario has come to pass. You’ve been hacked. What happens next?

If your hosting is done inhouse, then you’ve got a serious issue. All the data hosted on premise is lost. Identifying what has gone missing and how you will recover it is all but impossible.

By utilising a fully managed hosting service, the only loss to your organisation will be the time since your data was last backed up. As this will be done regularly, losses will be kept to a minimum. You can simply switch to your backed up data and maintain your service delivery. If your data is backed up irregularly, or not at all, the consequences can be far graver.

Compliance

A new era of data regulation was ushered in by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018. One of its central tenets is security. Losing personal data can lead to fines. Big fines. Being able to evidence that you’ve done all that you can to protect sensitive data goes a long way to appeasing the regulator in worst case scenarios.

It is, however, another factor to consider. Choosing a hosting partner with up to date, relevant security certificates, for example ISO 27001, is crucial in this respect.

Training

Ransomware attacks, such as the one experienced by Hackney Council, are often the result of phishing attacks. Put simply, these are malicious emails designed to look legitimate so that people within your organisation click on them. Once details have been entered, attackers can easily access your system. This means that your frontline security is only as strong as its weakest link.

Opting to utilise a fully managed hosting solution can mitigate the impact of this weakness. It can never resolve it, however, only complimenting robust governance and systems. Ongoing staff training and awareness is vital in minimising the initial risk of a cyber attack. Should the worst happen, your system response will either exacerbate or minimise its impact.

Going green

On-premise hosting requires individual equipment, maintenance and power supply. Switching to a co-hosting or cloud solution reduces your energy consumption. There is a commitment by all companies and agencies to reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption – switching your hosting solution can contribute to meeting these commitments. At a time when energy costs have risen significantly, taking the green option isn’t only good for the environment.

Updates

From time to time your software will need updating. When you choose a hosted service, your provider will usually carry out this work as part of its services. This means that you don’t need to worry about planning IT time in ahead of an upgrade process, your provider will let you know when it’s happening and everything will be taken care of for you. This significantly reduces the stress and burden upon your resources in completing such work.

Conclusion

Utilising a hosting service carries a multitude of benefits for your local authority and its youth justice services. From reducing cost and helping to meet environmental targets, to meeting regulatory requirements and freeing up resources to focus on other projects, hosting can fundamentally support your youth justice services.

It may not be the topic at the forefront of everyone’s minds, but it is worth considering the worst-case scenario – what if your authority is attacked, or data goes missing? With nefarious hackers constantly seeking to exploit weaknesses, considering the fundamental impact of a successful attack is important. Losing data on vulnerable young people will have a huge bearing on the service that you need to provide to them. Improving outcomes for them is, ultimately, the desired outcome.

Whilst hosting may not be a silver bullet to these threats, it can mitigate their impact if they are successful. At the same time, it can reduce costs and your carbon footprint.

For more information on CACI’s hosting services for youth justice teams, please click here.

The importance of scheduling prison officers across the UK prison system

Posted on: 15 April 2022

Scheduling in prisons is vital across the entire infrastructure. Scheduling officers to rotas, scheduling inmates to activities and then monitoring and reporting on all activities opens a whole new level of insight. At present, much of the scheduling in the UK prison system is a box ticking exercise based on availability. But what if it could be more than that?

Assigning staff and inmates to jobs and activities is only one side of the coin. The other is data analysis and understanding. Has the best use of an officer’s skills and experience been made? Are prisoners involved in suitable activities? What are the outcomes of the decisions made?

This blog takes a closer look at the benefits of scheduling staff and prisoners across the prison system. How can having a central system, offering a bird’s eye view of the entire network, work to the benefit of the system? How can it underpin an improvement in outcomes for everyone?

Prison officers

Fundamental to the running of any prison are the staff who work there. Understanding the skills and experience of the prison officer workforce is the first step. Having a holistic view of the officers in a single prison, as well as the wider prison network, instantly provides a view of the entire workforce.

Being able to factor in the skills and experience of a prison officer instantly means that schedulers and administrative staff can assign tasks not only quickly, but more appropriately. Randomly assigning officers to tasks within a prison fails to best utilise their skills and experiences. Different prisoner profiles require different approaches. Considering an officer’s preferences when assigning them to jobs is likely to improve morale, too. If an officer has worked closely with certain profiles, e.g. offenders struggling with substance abuse, and has experienced success in that area, it makes sense to utilise those skills and that experience appropriately.

According to statistics from Statista, the number of prison officers working in England and Wales has fallen by 3,000 since 2010. This means that it is crucial that prison officers are appropriately assigned to role. Guesswork leads to mistakes and disillusionment.

It is also an issue which the Ministry of Justice is acutely aware of. In its December 2021 white paper, Prisons Strategy White Paper, the MoJ outlines its intention to boost prison officer numbers by some 5000 by the mid-2020s. Retention is another key aspect of the MoJ’s staffing intentions, to tackle a leaving rate of 11.1% in the year preceding 30 September 2021. “Enhancing professional skills: improved training, supervision and qualifications,” is central to this.

Technology can help. Not only can it instantly match skills and experience to available roles, it can also inform the training needs of the prison guards, thereby enhancing professional skills. Mandatory ongoing training is a prerequisite, but what about expanding training management efforts to open new skills and experiences to the workforce? This has the twin advantages of increasing the skills available across the prison, whilst also offering career enhancing opportunities to staff. A deeper pool of resources across your existing workforce is useful in times of strain, something we’ve seen during the Covid pandemic.

This also ties in with creating a broader understanding of the prison population. The population is transient by nature in certain prisons. Having oversight of the profile of prisoner in the facility enables better provision of resources to their needs. For example, matching prison officers with experience of dealing with and helping inmates with substance addiction.

Prison inmates

As the focus of any prison, understanding the needs of each prisoner helps to improve outcomes for them during their sentence. What makes for a good outcome? Hopefully a successful rehabilitation of the offender. Reoffending costs some £18bn.

Management and scheduling of prison activities is central to their success. The need for demand modelling is also clear. What profile of prisoner is in the prison at a given moment, and what courses and activities are required and how will spaces be allocated? The management of this can be complex. There are staffing resources, rooms and equipment to be factored in. Activities can clash, so what’s the order of priority for a prisoner? Managing waiting lists for activities is another consideration. Then there’s scheduling prisoners, where applicable, to tasks within the prison. You need to consider the jobs they need to carry out, as well as their activities.

All of this requires careful assessment and management. Prison staff resources must be allocated to the necessary background checks and assessments. Then those staff need allocating to the activities as appropriate.

Where this can be further complicated is the need to factor in a prisoner’s attendance at court. Prisoners need to attend their relevant hearings, and, in some cases, they must be escorted to and from court by prison staff. Understanding the impact of having staff off site for such visits must also be factored into the overarching prison schedule.

Prisons must also consider external visitors. From those delivering training courses to lawyers visiting inmates, all activities and their participants need to be carefully monitored and provisioned for. Each prison has its own interpretation of the rules around visits, so a degree of flexibility is required. There is also a need to communicate visiting hours with friends and relatives who wish to visit inmates.

Conclusion

Scheduling within prisons is a complex affair. There are several moving parts and resources can be strained. Having a system in place to provide a holistic view of activities, staff and prisoners can significantly help.

Understanding the skills and experience of your staff, then matching that to the needs and profile of your prisoners can help to drive improved outcomes for all parties. Leaving this to guesswork and random scheduling based solely on availability fails to make the best and most efficient use of available resources.

A central system enables schedulers and administrative staff to instantly account for each scenario. This removes the guesswork from scheduling and auto-matches the supply of staff and their skills and experiences, to the demands of the prison population.

It also facilitates effective reporting on activities, the prison population and demand forecasting going forward. Rather than being reactive to changes and scheduling, it facilitates a proactive outlook based around supply and demand.

Automation of scheduling in certain circumstances also frees up time to focus on planning. In an environment where time is so often at a premium, this can deliver tangible benefits to the training, activities and management of a prison.

The focus, however, is always on outcomes. Improving outcomes for staff and inmates alike results in a more efficient – and more effective – prison.

For more information on how Cygnum can underpin your workforce, planning and training requirements, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Joining the dots – linking education to circumstance

Posted on: 25 February 2022

What happens when a child is excluded from school? How is their educational journey completed? What can schools, parents and professionals involved with children in education do to intervene sooner, to help prevent exclusions? What is the profile of children excluded from school? Can we do more to support groups who are more likely to face exclusion?

Schools play a vital support role in the lives of children and young people, a role brought sharply into focus by the Covid pandemic. Bringing data together, we can join the dots in each student’s journey, linking their education to their circumstances to help improve their outcomes. For more context on the statistics provided in this blog, please take a look at our related white paper, which you can download for free.

Disadvantaging the disadvantaged

When we take a closer look at the numbers behind school exclusions, it becomes clear that children already born into disadvantaged circumstances are further disadvantaged by the education system. Children from the 10% most deprived areas of the UK are more than twice as likely to experience exclusion from school as other children (7.1% of these children experiences exclusion, compared to 3.4% from elsewhere). This extends beyond those areas, too. In 2017/18, 13.65% of children eligible for free school meals were excluded from school.

It’s a clear pattern. These children, too, are far more likely to be identified with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). 25% of children with identified SEND are also eligible for free school meals. The link between their circumstances and their education is obvious. If you’re from a deprived background, you’re far more likely to be identified with SEND and far more likely to be excluded from school. The already disadvantaged face a greater uphill battle than their peers.

In 2019, some 78,150 children were looked after in England. Alarmingly, that number has risen 28% over the previous decade. 56,160 were officially placed with foster families. When factoring in children living with relatives, e.g. grandparents, this number rises to much closer to 200,000.

How can education help?

Besides the obvious point around providing stability, structure, relationships and food, the role of schools requires careful consideration when it comes to supporting vulnerable members of society. The school admissions process can be haphazard and manual, with children missing spots at their preferred, often their most convenient, schools.

Failure to identify a child’s circumstances can lead to missed opportunities which carry knock on effects into a young person’s life. It’s a topic we’ve explored through Lara’s Story, which you can watch here:

Walk in their shoes – Lara’s story

Joining the dots

By creating a complete, holistic record of every child and young person, authorities and schools can join the dots in each story. Understanding this story is fundamental to improving outcomes. Where c.50,000 children are missing education across the UK, how can we identify them, those that have fallen through the gaps?

This is also in the realms of youth justice, since there are c.50,000 children involved in county lines gang activities. The similarity in those numbers cannot be coincidental.

We can easily identify, via basic data analysis, where the children who fall through the gaps are most likely to be. By extending our analysis, by painting a complete picture, we can begin to make appropriate provisions and improve outcomes for these young people.

As we can see in Lara’s Story, often innocent judgements can have severe consequences for young people and their families. As we approach a cost of living crisis, with rising energy bills and rising inflation, many families will feel the pinch. Little things like paying for the bus can quickly become unaffordable. The compound affect of this is material to a young person’s life.

Simply linking circumstances to a child’s education drives understanding. This understanding can be used to improve outcomes. And it can be done simply, too, via a central, accessible record. Where schools, parents and professionals can record and share information, joining the dots is made easy. You can then start to join several dots, creating rich data insight to inform future practices and roadmaps, understanding the best way to handle young people in specific circumstances.

Data informed practice extends from education through youth justice. Improving outcomes for young people is the combined target.

You can read our whitepaper, Joining the dots: The power of technology systems to transform outcomes for vulnerable children and young people here.

Conwy and Denbighshire County Council chooses ChildView from CACI to underpin its youth justice work

Posted on: 13 February 2022

Conwy and Denbighshire Youth Justice Service has chosen ChildView from CACI to underpin its vital work in supporting young people in its services across both counties. Conwy and Denbighshire will use ChildView to support its team across the both regions, looking after the needs of young people in, and on the periphery of, the local youth justice system.

The move means that ChildView now underpins youth justice work across the whole of Wales, with all 22 local authorities now utilising the system to create positive changes across the country.

“We chose ChildView as the fit for purpose youth justice system that best meets our service requirements,” says Matt Morgan, Service Manager at Conwy and Denbighshire Youth Justice Service. “We are looking forward to using the system to enable us to improve outcomes for the children and young people that we work with.”

“We are delighted that Conwy and Denbighshire has chosen ChildView to support its vital work,” says Phil Lucy, Head of Children and Young People at CACI. “It is a great opportunity for us and, more broadly, youth justice services across Wales, that ChildView is now used universally across Wales. The data insights this will help Welsh authorities to build, will have a tangible impact on the outcomes experienced by vulnerable young people across the country.”

ChildView enables youth justice services to record the full range of multi-agency working, in-depth casework and chronologies (including Adverse Childhood Experience ACES). They can then securely share data on the young people in their services. It facilitates deeper insights into what is going on at an individual level, as well as holistically across services. This means that Welsh authorities, YJB Cymru and Government and local justice services can better understand their work and make informed decisions about effective response to each young person, as well as to prevent offending behaviour.

With ChildView being used across Wales, it means that authorities can easily and seamlessly share data and case files with one another. ChildView is interoperable with other systems, too, meaning that youth offending teams can share vital information with schools, building the evidence base and responses to offending behaviour which will help to prevent and reduce the impact of crime.

For more information on ChildView, please visit: www.caci.co.uk/software/childview/

Effective workforce management – recruitment

Posted on: 7 February 2022

Staff turnover is an inevitability in any business. As is, hopefully, business growth. When a business expands, new recruits are needed to fulfil an expanding list of tasks. Pinpointing the skills and experience required, however, can be a challenge. It can make recruitment difficult for any organisation. So, how can you best tackle recruitment, conducting it seamlessly for the smooth running of your services?

Understanding is the vital ingredient. It’s one thing knowing that you need to bring people in, but it’s a different challenge being able to swiftly pinpoint the skills and experience required to best serve your business needs. Having a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce can help.

Knowledge driving recruitment

If you have a central system that holds all the information on your workforce, it makes the task of understanding the skills, experience and competencies available to you straightforward. You can easily run reports and gain vital insight. In industries such as construction, transport and healthcare, core competencies are vital in delivering frontline services. For example, if you have a low or dwindling number of staff appropriately qualified to administer injections, it gives you an opportunity to react before service delivery is impacted.

Now, this can of course be done internally via training programmes as we touched upon in our previous blog. The same holistic view of training and competencies across your organisation is vital in making informed recruitment decisions, too.

Where staff cannot be upskilled internally, it makes recruitment inevitable. Using a central system can make the task easier for management teams responsible for recruitment, by being able to identify specific skills and experience that are needed across the organisation. Recruitment isn’t just a numbers game and shouldn’t be left to chance.

How long will the recruitment process take?

Another crucial aspect is understanding how long the recruitment process will take. Managers will need to take time out from their usual tasks to conduct interviews; what’s the knock-on effect of this? There’s also a cost implication in terms of not having enough staff available and in terms of the shifting of resources to the recruitment process.

Diverting resources is obviously a big undertaking, so understanding the consequences upon your resources, time and budgets is fundamental. Having a central view of your workforce will again help in this regard, helping to map out your resources and their allocation.

Post recruitment

Once the recruitment phase is completed and you have new staff signed up, what happens next? The first aspect is once again linked to your competency management efforts. If someone says they have certain qualifications, particularly in safety critical environments it is a good idea to check. Evidencing certificates and obtaining references can be completed by the new staff member, with the copies then stored against their record in your system. This means that you will have oversight of their skills, qualifications and experience for the duration of their time with you. This will help your scheduling teams in being able to appropriately assign tasks to them.

Once you’re satisfied that they are appropriately qualified, they will then need to be enrolled into your organisation and the teams with which they will be working. This process may include mandatory health and safety training for new starters. Assigning this and making sure it’s completed can be done centrally, with any result again being stored against their record. This can trigger alerts for when any refresher training might be required in future, too.

Most jobs have a probationary period, something that extends beyond safety critical work and helps to ensure that people are up to the job for which you have employed them for. Similarly, it enables employees the opportunity to leave with shorter notice if they decide the job isn’t for them.

Keeping track of this probationary period is crucial. Assessments and feedback of their work will help to make informed decisions on whether or not they have passed. Storing all of this information centrally helps to give your organisation a complete view of its workforce.

Once a new recruit is up and running, they will hopefully be in a position to fulfil their tasks in the way needed. Seeing them become a regular part of your workforce asap is beneficial to service delivery. This requires careful planning and oversight of your organisation.

What specific skills and experience does your organisation need? Who will be required to recruit? How much time will be needed? What processes are in place to get new starters up and running? All of these questions can be answered when you have a bird’s eye view of your entire workforce. By linking training and competency management, you can make more informed and accurate decisions.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

A more efficient system to reduce duplicate inspections in UK farming

Posted on: 27 January 2022

The farming landscape is one of the most heavily scrutinised industries in the UK. Regulatory bodies inspect how farms protect, enhance and preserve the environment, control diseases and pests in animals and plants, protect trees and woodland and control subsidies. The landscape is changing, too.

The Sustainable Farming Incentive has recently been announced, set to be rolled out with the addition of standards all the way through to 2025. Farmers will be able to choose as many and whichever standards they like. Better performance against each one, i.e. producing more environmental benefits, will result in higher payment. This is all part of DEFRA’s efforts to invest in the environment, productivity, farmer resilience, plant and tree health and animal welfare.

Initially, in 2022, three standards will be available; two pertaining to soil and moorlands, one to livestock farming. More standards will follow, as outlined in this DEFRA Future Farming blog. To manage these schemes going forward and validate payments, farmers will have to apply for reviews. This means that keeping abreast of inspections will be vital for both farmers and the bodies inspecting them.

These changes do, however, represent an opportunity. Where farmers have received visits from various bodies at various times, there is an opportunity to coordinate the inspection of farms across the disparate bodies that inspect them. This is particularly important when looking at cross compliance and not disproportionally penalising a farmer for non-compliance in one area.

Having a central database of all inspections and their outcomes will facilitate a far more efficient system. Inspections, at present, are siloed into the bodies conducting them. Linking these bodies together and enabling them to review the outcomes of each other’s inspections, will greatly help them and the farmers.

A number of the inspections conducted on farms are similar in nature. Preserving the environment, protecting trees and woodland, for example, are similar elements. Merging the inspections for these, as far as it’s possible to do so, will reduce the need for multiple inspectors to be onsite at a farm. Using trusted data from another body to fulfil part of your own organisation’s inspection mandate is a much more efficient way of conducting the inspections. Less time spent onsite, same result. This will greatly reduce duplication for farmers.

It also makes sense for the inspectors. Farms are big properties that take time to navigate, necessitating sometimes lengthy visits. This reduces the ability of inspectors to conduct multiple inspections in a day. If, however, information can be used from another trusted body, this will help to reduce inspection times and open up the possibility of an inspector carrying out multiple inspections in a working day. This will help to facilitate inspections of more farms in the same time frame.

Correct use of technology systems can also help to schedule inspections more efficiently. If an inspector is in a particular area, for example, it makes sense to schedule them in and around that locality to reduce dead time spent travelling.

Marrying the capture of inspection outcomes to more rules-based scheduling of the inspection activity will help inspectors and farmers alike. Reducing the amount of duplication makes life easier for all parties.

Automation is another facet of scheduling and inspections that modern technology can bring to farming and associated inspections. Being able to automatically schedule an inspection and notify the farm reduces the need for manual interventions by staff responsible for arranging inspections. This feeds into follow-up tasks, too.

Where an inspection identifies an area for improvement or re-inspection, these follow-up tasks can be automatically created at the point of them being recorded. This leaves scheduling staff with more time to focus on exceptions.

Technology allows the scheduling of an inspector to be decided on fairly using a myriad of factors. For example, geographical proximity to a farm, or inspections being conducted nearby to other farms with similar needs, or the skills, specialisms, continuity and availability of the inspector.

Technology can also enable inspectors to capture their outcomes in real-time. By equipping inspectors with handheld devices, results can be entered through mobile forms and stored immediately, rather than having to spend additional time writing up the entire visit later. This means that reporting on and understanding an inspection, and any associated follow-up tasks, can be done instantly. Farmers will benefit as this can also speed up the post inspection processes and payment processing.

If outcomes from a different inspection can be factored in, too, these can be included in any report, instantly saving time.

The layers of complexity in the process of conducting farm inspections in the UK can be greatly eased by the correct deployment of technology. A single system enables inspectors to view their schedules and make their reports, whilst at the same time notifying farmers about upcoming inspections and the results of previous ones.

This efficiency will alleviate much of the duplication currently experienced by UK farmers. It will also make the changing regulatory landscape easier to navigate for everyone. A single, transparent source of truth will work to the benefit of everyone.

The notion of a single system and a single point of regulatory contact is an issue that we explored in our previous blog, Why England’s farmer inspectors are launching a war on duplication, which you can read here.