Children & Young People Archives

Single view of a child – linking youth justice to education

Posted on: 18 November 2024

Whilst the operations of education and youth justice practitioners run separate from one another, there are areas of overlap. In these areas, information sharing and working from the same record can be beneficial to both parties. Ultimately, it is also beneficial to the young people involved. A shared understanding via a single view of each young person can help in both intervention and improving outcomes for vulnerable young people.

Common understanding over crucial matters is a prerequisite. For example, where children are arrested, their school must be informed. This means that schools need to be able to send and receive information to and from the police and youth justice workers.

Whilst that might be an extreme example, it does of course happen. The sharing of information is the crucial aspect here, though. How far can this be extended to improve outcomes for children? Such examples highlight that information sharing is possible.

Attendance records

With every child required to attend school, their attendance data is instructive, not only to their school and parents/carers, but where applicable, social and youth justice workers too. Where a young person who is in the youth justice system misses school, it is imperative that this information is shared with their youth justice team.

Children missing school is an obvious red flag to youth justice and social workers. Mandatory reporting on the attendance of looked after children is already in place, further reporting on children known to other external agencies can help them greatly.

Sharing information and data is a key area in preventing children and young people from falling through the cracks.

How can shared data help in a multi-agency scenario?

There are various estimates as to the number of children missing education. This depends upon the parameters set and the threshold of days missed. NCB estimates that the number is just shy of 50,000. This number is for children who are not registered at a school and are not receiving appropriate home schooling.

Running parallel to this is the estimate that some 50,000 children are involved in county lines drug dealing activities. Of course, not every child missing education is going to be involved in such activities, but the numbers bear a striking similarity. If children aren’t at school, what are they doing? Perhaps more pertinently, under the auspices of which agency do they fall?

When children fall into the youth justice sector, an understanding of their school attendance record can be insightful in painting a picture of their journey. Non-attendance gives some strong clues as to what they may have been doing. Establishing this data link with education can help youth justice teams and workers greatly.

Similarly, when a child moves school, it is beneficial that their new school has a clear record of them. If they have been involved with youth justice workers, it can help in understanding their background and their requirements. Similarly, where health concerns are prevalent, it’s important that the school has oversight of such information.

A single view of the child

This is a topic we’ve explored in our recent white paper. “At present we are seeing far too many examples of children not receiving the care they need because of a disjointed service and system response. Teachers, care and social workers, police, parents, local authority professionals and youth justice workers – even doctors and health professionals – are all stretched; piecing together a young person’s story from disparate information points makes an already challenging task even more so. Information on a young person is too often siloed and inaccessible.”

The information held by one agency is often valuable to another. Everyone is pulling in the same direction, so creating efficiency and a more joined-up response to the needs of vulnerable young people makes a great deal of sense.

This can be achieved with a single view of the child. If there’s a consistent record that can be accessed and added to by multiple agencies, it makes it far easier for disparate parts of the system response to work efficiently and effectively.

Conclusion

There are demonstrably strong ties between the work done in agencies such as schools and youth justice teams. Linking that work together, where necessary and appropriate, can help to improve outcomes for the children and young people in their services. It can further support the work of other professionals and agencies involved in a young person’s journey, too.

The technology exists today to help make a difference; to help join the dots in a journey. This helps to remove duplication of effort, guesswork and assumptions. If all parties can work around a single source of the truth, it makes understanding a young person’s journey and interpreting their story much easier. Bridging these gaps in understanding at schools and in youth justice teams can further help to tackle the complexity in each story. Having a basic understanding of their journey is so important in shaping their future.

This is a topic that we explored in our recent white paper, Single view of a child. You can download your free copy here.

Gaining a single view of the child in multi-agency scenarios

Posted on: 11 November 2024

Every child in the education and youth justice systems has their own, unique story. How can this story be accessed, understood and interpreted by the various agencies that they come into contact with? A single view of each child, which is accessible to the multiple agencies, helps to form a consistent thread of knowledge and understanding. This can be used to provide not only the best available care to each child, but to improve efficiency across the services they interact with.

There are several examples where different agencies require the same, or similar, information. Teachers, care and social workers, police, parents, local authority professionals and youth justice workers – even doctors and health professionals – are all stretched; piecing together a young person’s story from disparate information points makes an already challenging task even more so. Information on a young person is too often siloed and inaccessible.

Creating a single view carries many benefits for both children and professionals. This blog explores the benefits of a single view of a child. This is not to say a single system response – different technology works for different agencies. We explored how interoperability between systems will benefit children in a previous blog. This blog sets out to explore the benefit of achieving this single view.

Improved efficiency and cohesion

With resources stretched, efficiency gains are vital in being able to provide improved outcomes to more children. Where personnel and agencies change, a single view is vital in them being able to hit the ground running. Where information is inaccessible and difficult to interpret, it can result in the same questions being asked and the same ground being covered.

Make it easy for new practitioners

Turnover of staff is inevitable. Making it easy for new personnel is imperative. Not only does it create efficiency, but it makes their job much, much easier. Starting from scratch with any child or young person is a challenging phase, with the need to build understanding and trust with them, particularly in a youth justice and social care setting. If new practitioners to a child’s journey can access and interpret their story to date, it helps them to understand the child, which helps them to take proactive steps immediately towards improving their outcomes.

Improve understanding of each child

There is so much that plays into each child’s journey, and so much information that is relevant to it. From school attendance data to police and healthcare records, it is a constantly moving and evolving journey. A simple oversight of the agencies involved is instructive; what care have they received and from whom? This helps to not only understand each child individually, but to implement data mapping which forms a more holistic understanding of children in similar scenarios and what is the best way to help them.

Linking disparate responses

Each agency has information that is relevant to them and only them. Where the single view is beneficial is in areas of overlapping responses. For example, schools need to know if a pupil has been arrested. Similarly, if a child is diagnosed with SEND, that information is relevant to their entire educational journey. It is also useful information for youth justice workers in understanding young people in their services. A sharing of such information is vital in the multi-agency response to such children. If this information becomes siloed, it will hamper the response of other agencies to a young person.

Timely, accurate information

Once information is known, recording and sharing it with other agencies in a timely manner is crucial. Again, the single view is crucial, since it enables other agencies to access such relevant information against a child as soon as it is available. Accessing such information can help agency to tailor their response to a child as and when they need to interact with them.

Conclusion

The single view can be achieved in different ways, but it works to the same outcome: the improved outcomes of children and young people interacting with various agencies.

Where professionals can record their information, it is vital that it doesn’t become siloed. The sharing of relevant information with other agencies will fundamentally help them in achieving the goals they themselves set out to achieve. Everyone is pulling in the same direction, so it makes sense to support this with appropriate data sharing to enhance understanding of children and young people to improve their outcomes.

This is a topic that we have explore more comprehensively in our recent white paper, which you can download for free here.

The importance of interoperability in multi-agency youth justice scenarios

Posted on: 1 November 2024

In cases around vulnerable children, we repeatedly see how many different agencies and professionals are involved in their story. For a young person in the youth justice system, there are several agencies all attempting to intervene to improve their outcomes; youth justice teams, police, social workers, their school, parents and health workers. With so many agencies potentially in play, how can a clear and consistent thread of information be created on each young person for the betterment of their journey?

A single view of the child for youth justice workers

Having access to a single thread of information, a single source of the truth, is vital. It helps to remove duplication of effort not only for each agency, but for the young person, too. With multifarious agencies turning up on a carousel of touchpoints along the journey, many covering the same ground, it erodes trust in the services that are in situ to help them.

It can be challenging enough within a single agency. Youth justice teams are stretched. Human relationships don’t work to a set plan, so changes in personnel across a young person’s journey are inevitable. How can a practitioner who is new to a young person’s case understand and interpret their story without needing to repeat previously asked questions?

A central database of activities, touchpoints and notes is essential. A single thread of information makes it easier for information to be looked at and understood. If notes are siloed into individual practitioners, for example if they are recorded only via pen and paper, then it makes it incredibly difficult for others to pick up the pieces when they need to.

If interoperability between practitioners within the same agency is impossible, then how can this information be shared effectively with other agencies?

Achieving interoperability for the benefit of youth justice work

Interoperability starts within a single agency, in the way in which information is recorded, shared and understood within it. Interoperability then needs to extend to multi-agency scenarios.

The several touchpoints in the journey of a young person within the youth justice sector demonstrate this. How can the police effectively share information with the other agencies involved? How can youth justice teams make their information available to the other agencies? By creating a mutual base of understanding around each vulnerable young person.

Understanding is essential to improving outcomes. We also see the affect of things such as trauma in a young person’s story. How can their story and circumstances be interpreted in improving their outcomes? These often intangible aspects can go undetected – having a consistent base of information can help in identifying them. There’s no one size fits all solution to dealing with youth offending, so being able to interpret and understand their journey from a comprehensive base of information is crucial.

A single source of information is to the benefit of everyone; the young person, their family and the agencies involved in their journey. But how can this be achieved?

Technology response to interoperability

The underlying system of recording information is fundamental in achieving this. In the same way that there is no one size fits all approach to improving outcomes for vulnerable young people, there is no one size fits all technology system for the agencies involved in their journey.

It is inevitable that different agencies will deploy different technology. Information and security will be different for each, as will the method of recording of information. But how can the relevant information within each agency be made available for wider use by external agencies which are seeking the same outcomes?

Everyone is pulling in the same direction, so it makes sense to share information and valuable insight. Each agency needs to understand the intervention points of the others.

Conclusion

Every touchpoint recorded with a young person in the youth justice sector is relevant to their journey. It forms part of the system response to them and their case. Having a holistic view of these touchpoints is vital for youth justice teams and workers in interpreting their story and intervening appropriately to help improve their outcomes.

Creating a single view of each child helps each agency to better contribute to their journey. Interoperability of systems is essential in achieving this. Using software that facilitates interaction and data sharing with other agencies utilising different software will facilitate this.

Where information gets siloed, it essentially gets lost. It sits within an agency in isolation, useless to the other touchpoints a vulnerable young person will have with other agencies. Bringing this information together not only creates understanding around a young person’s journey, it also creates efficiency in the process for the agencies involved.

If everyone can record on and interact with a single source of the truth, it will help every agency and youth justice worker to understand and interpret the journey of the young person.

Creating a single view of the child is a topic CACI has explored in a recent white paper, which you can download for free here.

The SEND improvement plan and reshaping EHCPs

Posted on: 15 October 2024

One of the suggestions of the recent SEND review was to overhaul EHCPs, something that is being continued under the SEND AP improvement plan.

The Department for Education (DfE) commissioned the SEND Review in 2019. The aim of this review was to explore the challenges faced by children and their families with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). In March 2022, after much consultation, a green paper was published which puts forward several suggestions as to how the SEND process can be better administered to improve efficiency and, ultimately, improve outcomes for those children and their families. In amongst the plethora of suggestion sits one around EHCPs (education, health and care plans).

Despite delays to parts of the implementation of the recommendations laid out in the SEND green paper, the SEND Alternative Provision Improvement Plan seeks to press on with revised EHCPs; “This will include delivery of digital requirements for EHCP systems to improve experiences for parents, carers and professionals, decrease bureaucracy and improve the ability to monitor the health of the SEND system.”

What does the DfE want to do with EHCPs?

In short, the DfE wants to streamline EHCPs. As things stand, there is a loose outline for EHCPs but the level of detail within them is at local discretion. This has resulted in inconsistencies at local and national levels, leading to inconsistent responses to them. This is particularly acute where professionals work across two localities: getting to grips with two interpretations of EHCPs takes time and increases the manual, administrative burden upon professionals.

As the SEND green paper notes; “There were inconsistences in the structure, length and formatting of EHCP forms, with the samples included in the analysis ranging from a maximum of 40 pages in one local authority to between 8 and 23 in another. The EHCPs produced by the local authorities in the sample would take approximately 50 minutes on average to read aloud to a child. This lack of consistency means that partners who work across multiple local authorities must navigate multiple processes and templates, reducing their capacity to deliver support and adding to their administrative burden… We therefore propose to introduce standardised EHCP templates and processes.”

Sounds sensible, how will it work in practice?

The central hook upon which EHCPs will be hung going forward will be via a template provided by the DfE – a standard EHCP template with supporting processes and guidance is expected in 2025. This will standardise the information captured, simplifying the interpretation of the information within them and making it easier to input appropriately into each child’s journey.

Another rule that the DfE is seeking to implement around EHCPs is that any changes to them will need to be signed off by the parents of the child. Their increased involvement is seen as central to the success of the SEND process going forward.

The fundamental change to the management and administration of EHCPs is that the DfE is looking to fully digitise them. This will make the process much more efficient and transparent, reducing bureaucracy, since each EHCP will have a fully auditable trail of activities and inputs. This will make interpreting each EHCP much quicker, too, since a complete record of professional and parental input will be visible to schools, professionals and parents.

Creating a central record will enable for greater control, ease of access and interpretation of data for everyone concerned. Children with identified SEND necessarily find themselves in a multi-agency scenario, so tying their record together digitally makes interpreting and understanding their journey easier.

This indicates that information sharing regarding identifying SEND beyond the boundaries of administering education support and placement is vital. For example, youth justice practitioners often identify unmet needs and have contextual and relationship information to contribute to a complete view of the child. Having rich information from multiple sources to consider in the SEND process is key to formulating practical support for their journey and enabling their future life achievements.

Technology supporting the single view

“We think the case is clear for all SEND services to move to digital systems for EHCPs. Digital systems can deliver better experiences for both families and professionals and enable them to continuously improve their services – focusing staff time on working with families rather than being hampered by partial understandings and disconnected bureaucracy.”

A number of different system and technology solutions exist across the education domain, so there’s no chance of every authority and school deploying the same software. Where the DfE will want the systems to work better for children is regarding consistency and interoperability.

Most systems have potential to support interoperability for a standard set of data fields curated by the DfE and to communicate with any third-party systems to send and receive as well as extract information. Whilst there are always challenges defining best practice categories through suitable consultation this will be vital in achieving earlier intervention and better SEND outcomes through the EHCP process.

Conclusion

A standardised response to EHCPs will make the entire process more accessible and easier to manage. The response to SEND should not depend upon where you live and the process should be transparent and consistent for everyone.

As a longstanding and experienced provider in the education domain, we have long seen the benefit of extended access to information as well as standards for interoperability with third party software. The ability to send and receive data seamlessly creates more accuracy and efficiency in the multi professional collaborative process that will ultimately benefit of children and families with identified SEND.

Creating a rich, single view of every child can only be beneficial in collating data for understanding behaviours and tracking responses. We too often see information, systems and processes and practitioners siloed and struggling to tackle the challenge of improving outcomes for the diverse needs of all children. So, this intervention from the DfE is welcome and so as a supplier we will be proactive in supporting this.

CACI and ChildView – committed to youth justice

Posted on: 16 January 2024

The youth justice domain never stands still. As we create more data and more incisive ways to record and interpret practice and outcomes, we increasingly discover new patterns. These patterns are put to use in achieving our ultimate aim: improved outcomes for the most vulnerable children in our society. Where we can identify unmet needs earlier, we can enable prevention rather than reaction. Where we can know what is not working as well as evaluate what works, we can enact flexible options sooner, when and where they are needed. In depth data mapping of demand and responses is a vital support to frontline youth justice services. Such information has the power to show long-term socio-economic impact. This requires continuous improvements in the application of relevant research and tools and is why CACI remains fully committed to the domain.

CACI’s ChildView software has been the system of choice for youth justice teams across England and Wales for over 25 years. ChildView supports the entire country of Wales and more than 65% of England’s youth justice teams. We understand for several years it has been a challenging time in the domain; budgets have reduced, skilled staff have been hard to retain, populations are expanding and the cost of living crisis is only serving to exacerbate social issues and stress which leads to avoidable vulnerability exposing children to harm.

There’s much talk of efficiency, but efficacy is arguably more important. We are committed to continuous development of ChildView to demonstrate effective and efficient use of resources. However, as the largest and only specialist supplier we can uniquely focus on the YOS partnership to provide tools to generate whole system insights and enable collaborative innovation at a local and regional level. ChildView’s ongoing future roadmap focusses on reduced effort to create deeper insights about making a local difference at its core. We have been around for a long time and we intend to build on our unique know how for a lot longer yet.

That’s why we will work more closely with our customers at a regional level as well as the Youth Justice Board (YJB). We will ensure that ChildView provides compliance with YJB standards by actively helping with implementation in the majority of YOSs and to make ongoing changes to achieve the aims of the YJB. Unique ChildView full case data exchange between CACI systems makes it easier, quicker and more secure to share whole child journey data on young people. This means that rich practice records are shared in a consistent fashion to promote ongoing engagement to reduce risk and build resilience. It helps to ensure continuity and ongoing engagement as young people move between different services and localities, too.

Behind compliance and reporting, however, we understand partnerships and practitioners are working with real life stories, not just data points. Every young person has their own story and their own context. Understanding this is vital to engaging and making a difference to their outcomes.

Being able to record often complex and nuanced information on a child at several levels is essential. With multi-agency touchpoints, bringing all of this together into single, relevant dynamic views of the child helps make many more accurate decisions quickly to efficiently navigate multi agency scenarios. This can help to reduce noise and effort through uncertainty and unknowns as well as reduce duplication and questions to appreciate the battles with systemic trauma and trust in the services intending to engage positively with children and young people.

“Childview has been crucial in all of this in providing the opportunity to capture and analyse significant amounts of data on the different cohorts of children covered under the different strands of Milton Keynes’s Early Support Project,” says Diz Minnitt, head of youth justice and service support at Milton Keynes. “Further, Childview uniquely allows life event characteristics such as undiagnosed speech, language and communication needs, trauma and ACEs to be captured and used to add value to the analysis. This enables us to create rich sub-sets of our prevention data and thoroughly learn about what impact we are having and what is working. We can look at the numbers and the work we are doing that makes a difference.”

Creating such tangible insights drives us forwards. We are fully committed to supporting the future of youth justice and developing multi-agency partnerships in the vital work that you do and its outcomes for our society. We offer a unique team comprised of ex-service professionals who carry your and their passion for this uniquely challenging specialist work.

Trauma informed practice – how a West Midlands coalition is changing things

Posted on: 20 September 2023

The idea of trauma informed practice has been around for a while now (SAMHSA 2014). It remains, however, a burgeoning area of practice. The West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) is attempting to take this forward into commissioning policy. Through a coalition of public service agencies, it aims to promote a framework for trauma informed practice in the region. Knowledge, practice-based evidence, data sharing, combined training and service inputs will set new pathways towards achieving better outcomes for all children in the region.

“Trauma informed practice is a journey, not a destination,” says Lucy Cavell Senior Trauma Informed Practitioner at Barnardo’s, the children’s charity which is coordinating the work of the WMCA trauma informed coalition which sets a policy direction. “There are different approaches in the seven constituent local authorities. For example, Birmingham City Council has a slightly different flavour to other organisations, having taken a holistic approach to training around trauma informed practice within children’s services and schools.

“We’re creating a community of practice on behalf of the coalition. There’s a sharing of knowledge and of best practice being implemented. The coalition is a reflective space with strategic support for locally based networks. It accepts the regional differences in localities such as Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, but it’s still early days, we’re still learning, gathering knowledge and promoting connections and promoting building the evidence base.”

Trauma informed practice in the West Midlands

The WMCA trauma informed coalition was established in 2022 in response to Punishing Abuse, to develop trauma informed practice in the localities. It includes the West Midlands police force, public health, primary care, local authority children’s services, schools, faith groups and charities including homelessness, temporary accommodation, drug, alcohol, domestic violence and mental health. The trauma informed coalition is borrowing from the learning about violence reduction and service developments in Scotland and other regions, such as in Wales, aiming to adapt this to the history and demographics of the WMCA.

“We saw the potential in being involved in such a coalition and the benefit that it can bring to so many vulnerable children,” says Lucy. “Punishing Abuse is a powerful piece of work that demands action. One of the primary barriers to this is siloed short-term responses. Services interact with children in the way that they see as being most appropriate and that makes sense to them. Children move in and out to other areas of the regional system with unseen and unmet needs and are dealt with in an entirely different way.” The importance of a more optimal and joined-up approach which is able to consider much more of the individual context of each child’s journey is something we’ve written about previously.

“One aspect has been the simple creation of training material to promote trauma informed practice,” says Lucy. “We’ve seen real leadership buy-in from the police, with training delivered to over 2,300 officers and staff so far. This covers the basics, from psychology and behaviours to appropriate skills in formulating partnership responses. This has seen a much more compassionate response from the police towards children, young people and families and their communities. Simply by understanding their behaviours differently it has increased the window of tolerance in police settings.”

What the future will bring

There is no blueprint for trauma informed practice and it remains a development area of work with vulnerable young people and their families. As Lucy outlines, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will work.

“We hope that establishing a trauma informed framework via the coalition will at least set us on the path to end the punishment of abuse,” concludes Lucy. “The goal is to commission interventions that facilitate systemic resilience. Of particular interest and relevance to establishing a consistent unified approach across Educational settings is the Trauma Informed and Attachment Aware Schools regional certification model, informed by the work of ARC, Virtual Schools, Educational Psychology Services and Barnardo’s in the region.

“At the heart of the coalition is the intention to engage with adversity and trauma in regional localities to meet needs in an optimal way. Further, to promote evidence from effective collaborative partnership practice by capturing, monitoring and sharing relevant data and the context of individual, family and community adversity and trauma ethically. The objective is to make smarter service commissioning investments for the longer-term future of the region. There will be a need to step back to see what works and what doesn’t. It is, after all, early days.”

In the second part of this blog series, we will take a closer look at what success looks like for the WMCA trauma informed coalition.

Johnny’s Story – the importance of early intervention and trauma informed practice

Posted on: 11 September 2023

Not so long ago CACI produced a video titled Walk in Their Shoes: Johnny’s Story. You can watch it here. It follows the typical journey of a young person brought up in adverse circumstances, tracking a story everyone involved in youth justice and many in education will be familiar with. The relentless churn of life, the destructive tendencies this realises then the horrific prospect of where this can, at its worst, lead. The topics of early intervention and trauma informed practice crop up often, but how much ground has really been covered?

Yesterday’s issues still exist today. School exclusions still happen as a result of schools being ill-equipped to manage the manifestation of trauma in such children as Johnny. They move from school to school, home to home, experiencing instability at every turn. This leads to disjointed record keeping and tracking of their journey. Different schools approach things in different ways. The transition to different local authorities results in intervention from different youth justice teams. This means more people coming and going and the going over of old ground.

How can trauma informed practice change Johnny’s Story?

It’s one thing realising an issue, quite another solving it. To fully understand the journey that any young person has been on, joined-up record keeping and a consistent thread of information is vital. As the young person moves from school to school and/or area to area, it is important that their information is appropriately shared with their next school or local authority. If it’s not, context is lost. Trauma informed practice is impossible without knowledge of events in a young person’s life.

Joined up record keeping is crucial in even the most vanilla of journeys. Where youth justice teams are involved, the context of the journey is even more so. If a young person arrives with limited information, then it necessitates the going over of old ground with them. Repetition of questions limits responses and creates mistrust in the services that are there to help them improve their outcomes. This limits the opportunities for trauma informed practice.

YOTs are seeing just over 8,000 new children (aged 10-17) entering their services every year. Consistent and reliable record keeping helps them to process these vulnerable young people. Services can then focus on achieving the best possible outcomes for them.

The most dramatic aspect of Johnny’s Story, of course, is the fact that he commits a murder. Thankfully, this isn’t a common occurrence, but young people possessing weapons still is. There were just under 3,500 knife or offensive weapons offences in the 2021/22 reporting period. This shows the prevalence of young people in vulnerable positions carrying weapons that can result in loss of life. As Johnny’s Story serves to highlight, such weapons are carried for protection rather than intent, but it only takes a moment for that to change.

Are things heading in the right direction?

The good news is that the number of such offences – the carrying of offensive weapons – has fallen from a high of 4,500 in 2017/18. Similarly, the number of new children entering the services of YOTs has fallen 10% year on year and is down 78% on the 2011/12 period which saw a record high. There has been a steady downward trajectory ever since.

Whilst these are encouraging figures which clearly demonstrate that the hard work of YOTs, local authority leaders and police is working, there are other areas of concern.

The latest data published 18 May 2023 by the government shows that, “Local authorities identified an estimated 94,900 children missing education, that is not registered at school or otherwise receiving suitable education, at some point during the 2021/22 academic year.” Estimates, however, vary as to the exact number depending upon differing definitions of missing school, as you’ll see in the National Youth Agency document in the next section.

This is another area where joined-up thinking and a consistent and reliable thread of data are vital. Local authorities have an obligation to check up on children who are not being educated at school and are being electively home educated. Schools must inform the authority if a child is excluded, so there is an onus on the authority to follow up on such cases.

It is clear that many are falling through the cracks. The Covid pandemic undoubtedly played a role, with many children not turning up again when children returned to schools in September 2020. This leaves such young people open to the threat of exploitation.

How young people like those in Johnny’s Story can become exploited

The most prominent of this exploitation is County Lines drug dealing activities. Gang activity is central to Johnny’s Story and is something that offers many vulnerable young people an identity and a perceived escape from their position. Exact numbers are impossible to come by, but notable estimates exist as to how many young people are involved in County Lines activities.

The National Youth Agency summarises the estimates on page four of this document. They cite data from the Home Office that c.27,000 young people are involved in County Lines, with The Children’s Society estimating that 4,000 of those are in London alone. Of course, estimates again vary here. The Children’s Commissioner noted in a Channel 4 documentary Britain’s Child Drug Runners (sadly no longer available on the channel’s streaming service) that 50,000 children are involved. Either way, it’s an unacceptably high number and represents a significant challenge.

Early intervention is vital in improving Johnny’s Story

The advantage of a joined-up record extends beyond the individual. Identifying patterns from a culmination of journeys can play a crucial role in early intervention. By the time vulnerable young people are involved in activities such as County Lines, it’s all but too late. Identifying their vulnerability in advance of reaching that stage is where stories such as Johnny’s can really be turned around.

Technology is fundamental to this. Where manual records are kept, information becomes siloed into teams and, worse, individuals. Maintaining transparent, up to date records helps keep YOT workers and their teams informed of each journey of each young person in their services. Then, if they move on, either the worker or the young person, the record can be shared with the next YOT worker involved in the case, furnishing them with knowledge and understanding of that case straight away.

Systems such as CACI’s ChildView facilitate the full case data transfer of files when a young person moves on from a service. This means that their next locality has vital context regarding the case immediately. YOTs working in tandem with one another creates a rich tapestry of information at an individual and holistic level. This will help to inform one another of best practices and create data mapping that can be used to inform better practice interventions in the future.

Conclusion

Johnny’s Story is grimly familiar to so many of you. Maybe not all of it, but so many vulnerable young people have experienced at least part of it. From constantly moving home, having different adults in their lives all the time, failing to settle at school and getting shunted from one to the other, lashing out in the form of petty crime and damaging public property, to seeking identity and purpose in gang-related activities; it is a very easy trap for them to fall into.

The good news is that things are improving. There is greater awareness of the issues facing these young people and the burgeoning area of trauma informed practice, for example, promises a better informed future roadmap of service responses. Each authority needs to be interoperable with every other, however, to truly open the door to fully informed practices and services.

Technology will facilitate this. In order to avoid the constant repetition of Johnny’s Story, it’s vital that authorities and YOTs embrace the possibilities.

For more information on ChildView, please click here.

SEND safety valve funding and the aim of inclusivity and integration

Posted on:

Government bailouts to the tune of £1bn are ensuring that councils across England can cut their deficits. In return for this SEND safety valve funding, a focus on inclusivity of educational services to children with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) is demanded. The move is designed to move councils away from a reliance on costly special measures educations. With inclusivity, it is expected that children with SEND will be reintegrated into mainstream school settings. Those who have been previously excluded, will be reintegrated into the mainstream setting.

The packages and fine print are different for each council, but these are the overarching themes. Councils are expected to work towards inclusion and integration, whilst being more accountable for their processes. How can councils achieve this?

The role of technology in supporting SEND safety valve funding

In creating transparency and accountability, technology will be fundamental to councils. As part of many of the safety valve funding bailouts, the government expects to see results. Maintaining manual systems of spreadsheets or paper-based notes is inefficient and ineffective. Being able to call upon robust digital records with every course of action mapped will save time and create much needed transparency.

Education, health and care plans (EHCPs) are also central to the SEND safety valve funding aims. It is important that each child who needs one receives one. One complaint across the board has been the inconsistency of the provision of this service across England. It has become something of a postcode lottery. Reshaping EHCPs was a central component of the SEND Review in 2022. The safety valve funding provides another opportunity to meet this challenge.

An aspect of this is early intervention. Many children go with unmet needs for a long period of time. This can result in behavioural challenges, exclusions and even entry into the youth justice system. A study by the National Institute for Health Research in 2021 found that 60% of children entering a youth justice service had an undiagnosed developmental language disorder (DLD).

Applying special measures later down the line is a costly process both financially and societally. Early intervention is a vastly preferable way of handling such issues.

Technology will support councils in monitoring their work in all these areas. EHCPs require a robust and consistent thread of attainment and information that will follow the child from 0-25. How children are included and reintegrated will also require input from several touchpoints such as parents, schools and professionals. Creating a central data hub for each child will make provisioning for their education easier. It will also make evidencing action points straightforward.

How SEND safety valve funding will improve inclusion

Primarily by building capacity in mainstream schools, thereby reducing the dependency on specialist provision. The SEND safety valve funding is there to directly support this, providing additional support in mainstream schools to support children with SEND.

This can cover EHCPs, too, with identified SEND on the increase as awareness of unmet needs increases. Having the administrative capacity to oversee EHCPs for every child with SEND is a challenge. Again, this is where technology will play a crucial supporting role for councils and their educational facilities.

Of course, specialist provision will still be required in some circumstances. Rather than use it as a go-to, however, the government would like to see a reduction in this. Creating a strong base of evidence, with all of a child’s records and professional inputs, will make it easier for schools and councils when demonstrating why such a course of action has been taken.

How SEND safety valve funding will support integration

In a similar way, SEND safety valve funding will support integration and reintegration. Exclusions happen but understanding why is paramount. SEND safety valve funding won’t eradicate exclusions and there will be circumstances in which they are necessary. When a child is excluded, however, having the context around their journey can help to inform next steps. Where there is SEND and unmet needs, can a child be reintegrated into a mainstream school environment where extra provisions have been arranged?

For reintegrating previously excluded children, a robust data source is imperative. Why was the child excluded? What were the circumstances? What are the circumstances in that child’s life? Were there any unmet or undiagnosed needs? Can new arrangements satisfy their educational needs within a mainstream setting?

This is a topic we’ve explored in a previous blog. The role of councils and schools in gathering accurate and reliable data is important in understanding not only a child’s educational journey, but their circumstances beyond the school gates.

Conclusion

SEND safety valve funding offers councils and schools an opportunity to recalibrate their services. And their approach to children displaying challenging behaviours. Understanding these behaviours and enacting early intervention will help prevent exclusions and improve inclusion for children with SEND.

Deploying a robust technology ecosystem will be crucial to the success of safety valve funding and councils and schools meeting the challenges laid before them. Joining the dots between a child’s circumstances and their education will drive understanding. This, ultimately, will determine the success or failure of safety valve funding. Deploying improved SEND provisions is one thing. Evidencing their effectiveness and meeting the goals of inclusion and integration are another. A strong evidence base will further drive understanding of those measure which work and those which do not.

For more information on how IMPULSE Nexus from CACI can support your education services in meeting the challenges laid out in the safety valve funding initiative, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/impulse/

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.

How can local authorities monitor elective home education pupils?

Posted on: 23 June 2023

Elective home education (EHE) has been on the rise since the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. A recent report by Schools Week suggests that elective home education has risen by 60% since the pandemic. Up to 125,000 children now educated in this way. There are obvious safeguarding issues for local authorities to follow up on, from children missing education to ensuring that those children who are being home educated are in a safe environment and receiving an appropriate education. There are significant barriers to this for local authorities, however, not least in the form of there being no legal requirement for parents to inform local authorities that they are educating their child(ren) at home. So how can the challenge of monitoring these children be met?

This challenge is particularly acute for children who simply never enter full time education. Where a child was previously attending a school prior to receiving elective home education, schools have a duty to inform local authorities of their deletion from the school roll. A joined-up data approach is essential in order that correct and robust oversight is available.

As the Schools Week report highlights, however, growing numbers of elective home education pupils will inevitably result in a greater strain on local authorities in relation to monitoring and safeguarding. With more children to keep tabs on not being met with a similar increase in the number of available resources, it is vital that authorities find the most effective and efficient route to fulfilling their obligations.

How can authorities monitor elective home education students?

Data sharing is one obvious area in which authorities can help themselves and each other. Having a technology ecosystem in place that facilitates data capture from schools, local authorities, parents and any other professionals involved in a child’s educational journey plays a significant role in creating the transparency required for local authorities to act.

The background context for each elective home education child is another aspect that helps local authorities. If a child is known to local youth justice services, has identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) in England – additional learning needs (ALN) in Wales – or has previously been excluded from school, then there are areas around safeguarding and appropriate provision of education to them. This ties into the emerging area of trauma-informed practice when it comes to dealing with children and young people across the education and youth justice sectors. Put simply, context is vital, yet can only be factored in with a joined-up approach is adopted.

Of course, none of that is to say that every elective home education child has safeguarding concerns around them. Many parents and families opt for elective home education for myriad reasons and do a perfectly good job of educating their children. It is still important, however, that is satisfied in the eyes of the local authority.

Fulfilling obligations to elective home education students

So, how can local authorities fulfil their obligations for elective home education children? Making the capture of relevant data as easy as possible is the first step. If a child is taken off the register at the school, the school has an obligation to inform the local authority. How is this data received by the appropriate personnel at the authority? Once visits are scheduled to families, how are the outcomes of such visits recorded within the authority? If a child moves into or out of a local authority, how is that data received or shared with their next authority?

Technology is at the forefront of this. Removing the need to manually trawl through records makes the process far more efficient. If practitioners can easily access full case records, they can pick up and understand a child’s journey quickly. They can then record the outcomes of their own work against a child’s record. This maintains a single thread of information relevant to the child.

Conclusion

Portals can play a significant role, too. For example, IMPULSE Nexus from CACI is a modular system which features school, parent, provider and professional portals. Each touchpoint with the child has the ability to record relevant information which is then stored against a single record. This helps to maintain a holistic view of every child, with relevant data being made available to relevant parties. In the case of elective home education children, local authorities being notified instantly when a child is taken off register or excluded will trigger the appropriate follow up activities for the relevant personnel.

Ultimately, treating each family and child fairly and transparently is paramount. Every child has a right to access education, ensuring that families are appropriately providing this ultimately falls to the local authority. The tools exist to make this process more effective and efficient for everyone. Our data sheet takes a closer look at elective home education, what local authorities need to do inline with the Education Act and how they can best support children and families. You can read it here.