Data Management & Integration Solutions Archives - Page 2 of 8

Scheduling – getting the most from workforce management in the transport industry

Posted on: 6 March 2024

Having the right people in the right place at the right time sounds easy. In largescale transport organisation, effective scheduling is crucial

At the heart of workforce management sits the simple sounding task of scheduling. Your organisation has shifts to fulfil and a pool of workers to fulfil them. Add staff to the rota and away you go. Such shift patterns can be sacrosanct across organisations of any size, providing clarity to workers, management and administrators alike. In largescale transport organisations, however, there are several moving parts to consider and shift patterns can be thrown off course by anything from weather to equipment failure and cancellations in the supply chain.

This blog aims to take a closer look at scheduling in transport organisations. It’s a topic we’ve covered in greater detail in our recent white paper, Tackling workforce management complexities in transport. If you would like to explore the topic in greater detail, you can download a free copy here.

There are myriad tasks that need completing across the transport industry. The complication introduced to the scheduling process often requires a lot of manual work by administrators and schedulers. People fall ill, take holidays and external events can throw a schedule completely off kilter.

Automation in workforce management

Automation of scheduling can greatly reduce the administrative burden. At its most prosaic, automation can simply assign workers to shifts in advance. This can be set out indefinitely, with new workers swapped in for departing/unavailable members of staff easily. Such a process can consider your bespoke business rules and any other factors such as the working time directive and fatigue management.

Where automation can lend a vital hand is in times of strain. We’ve seen examples, notably during the Covid pandemic, of vast swathes of a workforce being absent at once. Where a manual process exists, this resulted in inevitable cancellations of services. With carefully configured automation, it is possible to be more agile in the face of disruption.

Where a worker is absent, having a central system and a central view of your entire workforce enables swift consideration of replacements. This works for smaller examples, too. For example, if a train is delayed and members of crew onboard it are required to meet another service which they will now miss, how can this be handled?

An automated process enables identification of other members of staff who are nearby and can be reassigned, whilst at the same time handling all communications with staff members. The staff who have been delayed can then be reassigned to other tasks, ensuring that their shift isn’t wasted.

Variable demand and moving parts

Another factor to consider in the transport industry is variable demand and moving parts. A high level example of this is the change in train timetables during the Christmas period. Fewer customers means less demand for services, therefore, services can be reduced to ensure more efficient use of the network and staff time.

A more short-term example of this is in shipping. Where a port is expecting a shipment, staff need to be prepared to meet it to initiate the unloading and loading of it. Variation is frequent in such a scenario, since ships can be diverted at a moment’s notice to other ports due to factors such as storms. Another example would be the blockage of the Suez Canal. This can leave a port with a full roster of staff without a function to fulfil. This is a waste of time, money and staffing resources.

Mapping out the changes caused by variable demand in a central system can help to understand its implications. Factors such as cost can be calculated and your response to it can be better informed. Understanding where the risks of variable demand are most likely to occur can help mitigate its impact.

Another example is with revenue protection officers on trains. Understanding the demand for services helps to better utilise them. There’s little point, for example, scheduling ticket inspectors during rush hour to major stations, since moving through the train is all but impossible. Similarly, there are more likely to be barriers at major stations, so working out the best deployment of such staff is more likely to realise the ultimate aim of their work.

Overlaying tasks onto shifts

Establishing a schedule is one thing. Rosters can be worked out well in advance and communicated to staff. But what happens when they show up on the day? Often the set number of employees turn up and discover the specifics of their tasks at that point.

Utilising a workforce management system such as Cygnum helps organisations to understand the specifics of the tasks that need be fulfilled during a shift. This helps organisations to better prepare aspects such as equipment required, time needed to complete the task and where exactly they need to be.

This helps to drive better understanding and efficiency through shifts and tasks. Matching specific skills and experiences to not only shifts, but also tasks, better ensures that the right people are performing the right tasks.

Conclusion

Scheduling can be a complicated and nuanced process, especially across largescale organisations. With several moving parts, variable demand, unpredictable disruptions and the usual ebb and flow of workforce absences, managing the process can be extremely complicated. This can result in inefficiency and poor service delivery.

Introducing automation, clear communication and overlaying tasks onto shifts helps to better understand your workforce the tasks required of them and more accurately assign staff to tasks based on their skills, experience, training, availability and geographic location.

This is a topic that we’ve explored in greater detail in our recent white paper, which you can download freely here. Alternatively, if you would like more information on how Cygnum can help you with your workforce management requirements, please visit our website.

Appeals and school admissions: how to handle them efficiently

Posted on: 28 February 2024

Appeals are an inevitable part of the school admissions process. How can they be effectively and efficiently handled to make the process easy and fair?

Effective and efficient handling of the school admissions process is essential to achieving the goal of a fair and transparent process for all. In this blog, we will look at the appeals process. Appeals are an inevitability. Every admissions authority will have to deal with them every year. In our last blog we looked at oversubscription criteria. They go hand-in-hand with appeals, since they are only required when more applications are received than there are school places available. Evidencing them, and how they’ve been adhered to, is essential to a fair and transparent appeals process.

The central tenets of the appeals process are twofold. Firstly, every parent has the right to appeal a place on behalf of their children. Secondly, the process must be fair and transparent. As we discussed previously, oversubscription criteria must be publicly available and their bespoke ordering by authority laid out.

The appeals process becomes a possibility when the authority rejects a child’s application. In rejecting it, the authority must:

Make clear the reasons why the application was rejected
Inform the parent of their right to appeal
State the deadline for submitting any appeal
Provide the necessary details to make any appeal
Inform the parent that they must set out their grounds for appeal

The report for the 2022/23 school year shows that there were 53,086 appeals; 38,186 for secondary school applications and 14,900 for primary schools. This that means that 3.5% of applications are appealed by parents. So, how can the process be handled fairly and transparently?

Efficient processing of appeals in the school admissions process

The School Admissions Code lays out that authorities must establish a panel to hear appeals. Where appeals are heard by a panel, the decision is binding; the school must either admit the child or the application is confirmed as rejected.

In the 2022/23 school year, 19.8% of appeals were successful. This shows that authorities are getting the majority of rejections right. Yet, mistakes do happen.

Technology can play a fundamental role in fair provision and oversight of the admissions process. Where a place has been rejected, for example, because a family resides outside of the catchment area, being able to show the working on this is essential. In a manual process, this means revisiting how the decision was reached. Linking to a geo-mapping application provides robust evidence in an instant.

Other criteria, such as faith, can quickly be evidenced, too. Where a parent hasn’t submitted relevant supporting documentation to evidence their child is of the same faith of the school, the authority can quickly demonstrate that other applications were accepted as a result of this.

Making the process easy for parents is paramount, too. With a parent portal, applications and appeals can be made easily and recorded against the child’s record simultaneously. This further helps with timelines, since any appeals process can be withdrawn after the established date for their submission has passed.

If a panel is convened to hear an appeal, they too can have easy access in one place to the process, the rejection and the grounds for appeal. This helps them to make better informed, fairer decisions.

Conclusion

Nothing can prevent appeals from happening. As the statistics show, they are a prevalent part of the school admission process. Rather, authorities need to be in the best possible position to respond to them.

Where the end-to-end process is handled in a central system, it makes evidence gathering, communications and reaching fair and transparent decisions much more straightforward. Messages and outcomes can be submitted and received via a central portal. This means that parents receive information instantly and can appeal via the same method.

Appeals are to be expected, so being in position to administer them is crucial. They are a central part of the overarching school admissions process. Having a system in place, linked to admissions and oversubscription criteria, helps to make the task of implanting a fair and transparent process much easier for everyone. If the system is simpler for schools and authorities, it will be for parents, too.

The technology exists now to make the admissions process easier to administer, as well as fairer and more transparent for children and their families.

This is a topic that we’ve covered in greater detail, examining the entire admissions process, in our recent white paper, A fair school admissions process for all. You can download a free copy here.

Managing oversubscription criteria in the school admissions process

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When an admissions authority receives more applications for a school than it has spaces available, it must order the provision of places according to its oversubscription criteria. These rules can be bespoke to each admissions authority. The criteria must be transparent and easy to understand, with a public outlining of the criteria available. So, how can this process be handled fairly and transparently?

Admissions arrangements must be in line with the School Admissions Code. “The purpose of this code is to ensure that all school places for maintained schools and academies are allocated and offered in an open and fair way.” The code has the force of law.

Exceptions to oversubscription criteria

There are exceptions to whom oversubscription criteria do not apply. Children with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) who have an education health and care plan (EHCP) which specifically names a school, must be offered a place.

Once they have been offered a place, the highest priority must then be given to looked after children and previously looked after children.

Having a record of any EHCP or child looked after status in the authority’s system already makes it easy for admissions teams to validate the status of such an application. A joined-up approach is essential for handling applications fairly and transparently. A robust evidence base also makes handling appeals much easier.

Once EHCPs and children looked after have been allocated places, the rest of the applicants must be sorted through. In the easiest case scenario, there will be fewer applications than there are available place and, simply, they must all be offered a place.

Setting out your oversubscription criteria

Every admissions authority must set out its arrangements against which school places are allocated in the event of oversubscription. Each authority can define and order the criteria in their own way. There is no prescribed ordering of criteria, or even which criteria must be included.

The following is an inexhaustive and unindicative list of oversubscription criteria:

Siblings: It may sound obvious, but the authority must outline its interpretation of the term ‘sibling’. This is to cover step-siblings and adoptions. Linking family records in a central system makes defining and implementing the interpretation straightforward.
Catchment area: These must be designed by the authority to be reasonable and clearly defined. Linking this to digital mapping solutions can further help define a catchment in a system by considering factors such walking time to a school.
Feeder schools: These must be nominated by the authority and clearly defined. Linking records in a central system helps determine this, since obtaining current school attended information is easy.
Social and medical records: Authorities must clearly set out how social and medical records will be used in this context. Enabling parents to submit any records as part of their initial application makes the process easier for everyone.
Ability or aptitude: Any such requirements must be publicly available. Only grammar schools can base their entire intake based upon this.
Faith schools: Enabling parents to submit supporting documentation at the point of application makes determining this much easier for everyone. Where faith schools are undersubscribed, places must be offered to all applicants regardless of faith.
Children of staff: The School Admissions Code states that this applies to children of staff who have been working at the school for two or more years, or where the staff member has been recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skills shortage. Linking records again helps to make determining this easier.

Conclusion

Oversubscription criteria are essential to a fair and transparent admissions process. Where places are appealed, a robust set of protocols also helps to argue the admission authority’s decisions.

It is also a process that can be automated. Where complete information on a child is held in an authority’s education management information system, all relevant information can be submitted by parents, schools and professionals, recorded against the child and considered when oversubscriptions criteria are called upon in the school admissions process.

This makes collecting evidence for appeals much more straightforward. No more manually trawling through records, aspects such as catchment areas can simply be called upon and put forward to an appeals panel.

It also makes determining admissions based on the bespoke criteria of the admissions authority much easier. To use catchment area as an example again, linking to mapping tools makes determining distance from a school incredibly straightforward. The decision can then be logged in the central system, with no need to resort to spreadsheets and physical copies of children’s records and the outcomes of their admissions.

The technology exists now to make the admissions process easier to administer, as well as fairer and more transparent for children and their families.

Reducing risk in the transport industry through workforce management

Posted on: 21 February 2024

Reducing risk entails several factors. Most pertinently, worker safety. Rules and regulations exist to protect workers, from health and safety directives to working time directives, covering working conditions to fatigue. Then there’s risk to projects and tasks. If they are done improperly, then tasks need to be redone. This impacts overarching projects, both in terms of time and cost. Of course, accidents and mistakes happen. Building in mitigation for such events is prudent. But what if you can identify patterns and head off errors before they happen? Competency management, as part of a robust workforce management process, can help.

Workforce management – training

Training management is essential across largescale workforces. From mandatory ongoing courses, refresher courses and training staff in new skills to upskill your workforce and offer career progression, having a robust training programme in place forms the backbone of this.

By linking training to other areas of your workforce management, such as assessments and scheduling, it makes it possible to identify skills gaps across your workforce. To reduce the risk of these gaps impacting upon project and service delivery, you can appropriately train existing members of staff to fill these gaps.

It also makes it possible to utilise your training programme to focus on specific areas and tasks where mistakes are occurring. By pooling data from accidents and assessments, you can identify repeat errors. In doing so, you can then tailor your approach to training to better prepare staff for areas in which, statistically, they are most likely to pose a risk to themselves and overarching projects.

Workforce management – assessments

Knowing that staff have the appropriate qualifications, skills, training and experience is one thing. But how are they actually fulfilling the tasks to which they have been assigned? Regular, ongoing assessments of your workforce are crucial. This is both from a safety and a service delivery perspective.

From a safety perspective, many roles within the transport industry pose a safety risk. From infrastructure workers to drivers, the risk of getting things wrong can be catastrophic. It’s prudent to check in to ensure that tasks are being conducted properly.

From a service delivery perspective, mistakes can result in shoddy work. This means that it needs to be redone, which costs time and money, impacting upon project timelines and budgets.

This extends to maintenance, too. We regularly see on the rail network, for example, things such as signal failures which result in delays and cancellations. Regular assessments of infrastructure are vital to repairing the roof whilst the sun is shining.

Overarching planning to manage risk

Proper, robust planning builds in sufficient time to complete tasks, with enough room for reasonable error. People make mistakes, external factors such as the weather can waylay you and where there are several moving parts. Things don’t always come together as you’d hope. Mitigating for this by building it into your planning is sensible.

When it comes to specific tasks, however, granular detail is important. When scheduling your workforce, workers can be assigned to shifts on a rolling basis ad infinitum. But how can the specifics and the complexity of each shift and its tasks be considered? How can these then be communicated with staff?

Using a central system with the ability to overlay such complexity onto shifts can drive efficiency and greater control of the overarching project and its processes. It can be established according to your bespoke business rules and configured to factor in elements such as regulations and directives.

Understanding what will happen during a shift is important. If maintenance needs to be performed, being able to communicate exactly what equipment is required, the nature of the task and the location helps to prepare people. As the process continues, being able to intelligently alter task timelines based upon previous completion times and rates enables a more accurate scheduling of tasks. If, for example, you have set aside three hours for the completion of a task but staff are regularly completing it in two hours, then future timelines can be adjusted accordingly.

This helps to drive a more complete understanding of your projects and how your staff are performing against timelines and tasks. This in turn helps to mitigate the risk of work running over time, since you can rely on a robust database of previous work to inform future projects.

Conclusion

Finally, the regulatory aspect is crucial. Things such as the working time directive exist to combat elements such as fatigue. A central database that can further call upon the geographic location of staff can help to more efficiently assign them to tasks. If someone is 20mins away from the location of a task, it makes more sense to assign them to it than someone 1hr away. Since travelling time is considered as a factor in fatigue management, it’s an extremely inefficient use of time to swallow it up on travelling times.

Managing risk extends across the entirety of the transport industry, from workforce safety to service delivery. With so many moving parts – risks – being able to navigate them and efficiently and reliably match those moving parts to your targets is essential to achieving the ultimate goals of your organisation. A well trained, regularly assessed and robustly scheduled workforce forms the backbone of this.

The technology exists to help largescale transport organisations to gain greater control of their workforce management. From training and assessments to scheduling, having a single view of your workforce facilitates automation, insight and, ultimately, efficiency. It’s a topic we’ve explored in more detail in our recent white paper, Tackling workforce management complexities in transport. You can download your free copy here.

Unmet needs and data driven decisions: how Milton Keynes uses technology to support vulnerable young people

Posted on: 12 December 2023

In the first part of our case study with Milton Keynes Youth Offending Team we explored how the team uses ChildView. We examined how the system supports the team’s administrative functions such as reporting, and how the YOT is supported by CACI. In this, the second part of the case study, we sat down with Diz Minnitt, head of youth justice and support service at Milton Keynes, to look at the benefits ChildView has brought to the council outside of its office walls. How does ChildView support work with vulnerable young people in a rapidly expanding population? What tangible difference does flexible reporting bring to the YOT? How does technology help to join the dots in each young person’s journey to provide a single view of them, helping to improve outcomes and reduce elements such as reoffending? How can systems support in identifying more unmet earlier, to help with prevention?

We start by taking a broader perspective on the multi-agency approach within Milton Keynes. The MK Together Safeguarding Partnership brings together senior leaders from key agencies in Milton Keynes to agree ways to co-ordinate local safeguarding services, act as a strategic leadership group in supporting and engaging others and implement local and national learning, including from serious child safeguarding incidents. It has created an improvement in communication and accountability with the right people routinely updated.

“Working within this context has provided an opportunity for us to advocate on the part of people and families that the local authorities are working with,” begins Diz. “These are very vulnerable people and families; children in care, children in need and youth with unmet needs who are in the criminal justice system. We’re really starting to realise the importance of unmet needs and increasing our understanding of what stronger partnership working can achieve.”

Unmet needs – speech, language and communication needs (SLCN)

Following research and partnership work with the Association of Youth Offending Team Managers AYM in 2016, Diz told us about his original focus on identifying speech and language needs and developing what the YOS could do to help. “Following professor Karen Bryan’s original study in 2007, which identified 60% of children in contact with YOTs as having speech, language and communication needs, in 2008 we undertook our own four-month study with a speech and language therapist.

“We focused the assessments on key sub-groups in the service, those with repeat offending, disrupted education history or no education provision and those with suspected SEND (special educational needs and disabilities), and what we found was that 88% of these groups had significant SLCN – significantly higher than professor Bryan’s 60%.

“This was much closer to Prof Bryan’s figure of 60-90% for young people in custody, but what it highlighted was that there was a majority of those in contact with the service who had undiagnosed SLCN. Furthermore, these needs are very difficult to spot without a full assessment and hence are often referred to as hidden disabilities.

“Having effectively tested and proved the findings of professor Bryan’s academic study as a local reality in the high risk groups, particularly among young people who are repeat offenders, it was clear to me that such crucial unmet needs should inform youth justice and prevention practice across the entire system. Communication and the understanding that comes from this is key to thinking, processing, anticipating and understanding consequences. If we carried on as if children automatically have these skills, when it was clear they don’t, this was a recipe for failure carrying consequences for these children and for the rest of society.”

Connecting multiple agencies and teams

“It’s essential to reflect the importance of interconnection to this, too,” says Diz. “Most organisations, even those within the same local authority, frequently operate in siloes. They focus and prioritise the work that they need to do, that applies directly to them. However, achieving shared applied learning across the whole system to real life situations is the real world challenge and ultimately helps in achieving the goal of improving outcomes for vulnerable children.

“For example, it’s very clear that there’s an increased chance of a child with unmet needs entering the youth justice system. With the right focus this risk can be significantly reduced. Where people do not take a holistic view of this known risk, opportunities get missed and all professionals and departments don’t get the benefit from the insights and feedback that come from identification.”

Funding new projects, finding evidence

“For a new prevention project, you can only get funding once there’s a proof of concept,” explains Diz. “The SEND team at Milton Keynes initially picked up the bill for the speech and language therapy provision after the initial four-month funded period as they could see the benefits it would bring. Further funding for speech and language therapists was then obtained from NHS England, the Office for the Police and Crime Commissioner, the Home Office and most recently as part of Turnaround funding.

“This has consistently increased our screening and assessment capacity, meaning that we could identify SLCN earlier and can now clearly evidence that 88% of children and young people in contact with the service have SLCN. Milton Keynes is now one of a handful of youth justice services in the UK with speech and language therapists (SLTs) embedded in the team where an SLCN assessment is conducted by an SLT with every child.

“These assessments enable all of those professionals working with the child and their family to have greater insight, providing real opportunities for coherent, coordinated working with the child’s needs at the forefront.

“This complements the wider SEND focus and the understanding of needs arising from adverse childhood experiences amongst children across Milton Keynes. It also helps us to target interconnection with other parts of Milton Keynes’s services.”

“Like many Youth Offending Services we were in a position where we could see the impact as other services were cut due to the impact of austerity measures around funding. We had already begun to see the benefit of SLCN assessments and we had the evidence that children coming into the YJ system weren’t having their needs identified prior to contact with the YOT.

“As SEND support to schools started to be charged for we could see a nightmare scenario with the levels of children with previously unrecognised and unmet needs increasing as a direct consequence of schools being forced to make challenging decisions about how they use their reducing resources.

“To seek to counteract this predicted increase we started working with both secondary and primary schools offering SLCN assessments for their children who were at greatest risk of exclusion. With these assessments we discovered that 96% of those that schools had considered excluding have SLCN, confirming the ‘hidden disability’ impact of SLCN.

Promoting Reintegration Reducing Exclusion

“As well as providing free assessments to the schools, we also provided free specialist training around how to work effectively with children with SLCN and a host of other associated SEND needs. This removed a barrier as schools were no longer having to justify difficult choices with their budgets and enabled schools to develop better ways to support individual children and to adapt the whole school environment to enable swifter identification and support for those children with SLCN.

“This approach also supported a more compassionate way of thinking regarding challenging behaviour as we stress that, supported by the evidence, behaviour is an indicator of underlying causes that needs to be explored and understood.

“We have connected with different organisations to establish and evidence the research links and we saw more interconnects and overlaps with ACEs and SLCN. SLCN is not the only need, but its identification is frequently indicative of other symptoms of complex underlying needs. Identifying SLCN can trigger the process of further investigation.

“This overall approach is based upon our increasing knowledge of the needs that ultimately result in children finding themselves in the youth justice system. We can see clearly when this journey starts to arise and by definition the more we can go up these known tributaries to identify and meet needs earlier the more we can prevent children from being excluded from school, moved into alternative education or placed on part time timetables, finding themselves exploited or involved in offending behaviour.

“We need to use all of the information available to intelligently adapt the system collectively to identify and meet needs earlier. These children do not have the luxury of pausing, rewinding and replaying their lives if we collectively as professionals get it wrong or lack diligence and professional curiosity in our approach.”

“Childview has proved essential in enabling us to capture and extract the data needed for the evaluation of Promoting Reintegration Reducing Exclusion (PRRE) that has been undertaken by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology (CIC) in Cambridge University. The CIC are due to present their report imminently, but this was commissioned following some of the early indicators of PRRE which highlighted that we potentially see examples of unconscious adultification of children. The current systems in schools can become too focused on the behaviours without seeing beyond these to other symptoms and root causes of that behaviour. They can fail to understand reasons for the presenting behaviour and therefore can act to exclude prematurely.”

Data driven decisions

“With the introduction of the Early Support Project in 2018 we saw a 25% reduction in first time entrants to the youth justice system in its first 12 months.

“Milton Keynes is growing rapidly as a city and our resources haven’t always been tailored to match this growth. There has been an increase in gang-related activities post-Covid with an increase in the number of children coming into the system who were previously unknown to our services and those of key partner agencies. This reinforces the importance for us to act earlier.

“Milton Keynes also has a very young population which means a larger population pool of potential first time entrants into our youth justice system. Following an increase in knife related offences we developed a new strand of the ESP, ACT-Now which is focused explicitly on this area. Our ACT-Now model works by establishing direct contact with a young person whilst they are still in police custody within 90-minutes of us being contacted by the police. We then have a follow up visit with the young person and parents/carers within 48 hours to agree how we can work with them voluntarily. This has led to very positive engagement and a very low level of reoffending to date by those children who have been supported using this model. None of the reoffending to date (around 5%) has related to further knife carrying.

“The ACT-Now work has been funded by the Police and Crime Commissioner and the initial success led to the same approach being funded by him to operate in Slough and other parts of the Thames Valley area are being considered for further expansion. ACT-Now is being viewed very positively by the Home Secretary who is monitoring progress with the approach and it has recently been shared as a model of best practice amongst the network of police and crime commissioners.

“As well as significantly increasing timeliness of dealing with these offences, which is crucial for young people to understand the consequences of their actions, we are seeing improved outcomes for these young people and reduced reoffending rates.

“The cost argument is very effective for the police. Their approach is different to ours, but the outcomes are mutually beneficial. It’s cost effective and demonstrably reducing repeat offending. Reduced crime means fewer victims and we can demonstrate this from our data captured in detail in Childview.

Using ChildView to tackle capture and analyse data for tangible action points

“The Early Support Project aims to measure the reoffending rate over two years. The rate for young people who have been through the service is currently 1.81% and we have worked with c.500 young people. We know that the methodology, therefore, works. Correctly identifying needs earlier greatly improves outcomes for these 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 the Early Support Project. For many years we have used the prevention extended functionality which we purchased. The identify tool is extremely adaptable, enabling us to add different elements for the various strands, such as new screening and assessment methodologies. We can capture data about the different elements of the project work, most importantly providing verifiable evidence around the impacts and outcomes achieved.

“Further, Childview uniquely allows life event characteristics such as undiagnosed SLCN, 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, the work we are doing that makes a difference and the profiles in our Early Support Project, Turnaround, ACT-Now and PRRE.

“We need to analyse the pathways of all these cases via logging their identified adverse and trauma life experiences as well as referrals in and out of our projects. These include referrals for SLCN, SEND, substance use and mental health. ChildView is a flexible and adaptable system that enables us to track all of our different service and project approaches and methodologies.”

Youth Resilience Project

“Our Youth Resilience Project offers one-to-one mentoring at all stages of the youth justice pathway supplementing other models through support that is available end-to-end. It can be used at the beginning of their journey, for those children just starting to work with the service or those who already engaged with us, through to those transitioning out of the youth justice system.

“ChildView’s additional functionality helps us to differentiate needs from data captured and to enquire about the ways we can facilitate targeted prevention and help to children. It enables us to build practice-based evidence and utilise this information to inform where we need to build service system capacity and capability to reduce or eliminate criminal behaviour. Having the flexibility to shape and use our data from local project work is essential to us, this helps to reveal patterns and insight from our work and therefore to evidence and highlight the resources needed.

“However, ChildView also provides a standard framework for monitoring youth justice, for example first time entrants, offending and reoffending to ensure we create consistent information about impact. We aim to always focus on improving outcomes and data is essential to achieving this. The outcomes for children are ultimately what matters.

“All members of the team can access the data and interpret it. It’s transparent and accessible across the service. Because we share a common system with many other services in Thames Valley we can share our methodologies, learning and customisation with other youth justice services. This helps us to pool and build knowledge and approaches to improve outcomes for children in our domain.”

The benefits St. Helens Youth Justice Service realises from CACI’s fully managed hosting solution

Posted on: 24 October 2023

St Helens Youth Justice Service has been using ChildView from CACI for over 15 years. In May 2020 it decided to utilise CACI’s fully managed hosting solution to support its work. In this case study, we speak to Helen Williams, St Helens Youth Justice Service’s Information Officer about why the council decided to use the service and the benefits that it has brought about.

“One of the main reasons we decided to use the fully managed hosting service was to take the burden off the council’s internal IT department,” explains Helen. “Previously, any upgrades and issues went through that department. Being the council’s team, they are always very busy. We had to log issues with the internal helpdesk and take it from there. Given the scope of the council’s operations and the fact that we’re a small part of it, it often depended on who you got to speak to within the IT team as to whether they would fully understand the software and the problem. Now, when we go through CACI’s helpdesk, we know that we’ll be speaking to someone who fully understands the software and can help us immediately with the problem.

“Another factor was storage and server space. We hold a lot of data and this was taking up a lot of space in the council’s server room. The council was trying to reduce the number of servers it was hosting internally, so the offer from CACI to host our data was an appealing one. This also meant that we were able to utilise CACI’s security arrangements, whilst at the same time reducing the amount of space we were taking up in the council.”

Security was another factor for St Helens Youth Justice Service. CACI meets rigorous international security standards and is routinely tested to identify potential weaknesses. This enables customers to leverage CACI’s security spend in protecting their own data.

“We recently suffered a cyber-attack at the council which shut down most of our systems and we, as a council, lost access to a number of databases,” says Helen. “Because ChildView is hosted separately, however, we were still able to access the system and our data. This meant that we could continue to focus on our work, improving outcomes for the young people in our services.

“It also highlighted that we always have easy access to our data. I can grant access to the data to other people as required very easily and securely. The data works across other systems that we work with, too, making it easy to call upon and rely on.”

Efficiency is often a buzzword in local services. How can it be achieved? St Helens Youth Justice Service no longer has to wait for internal mechanisms to be run before upgrading ChildView or resolving any issues in the system. “Everything is much quicker now,” says Helen. “Any updates that we need are scheduled and done, there’s no hassle.

“Previously there was a lot of back and forth on available dates and when would be best to conduct the updates. Then there were times when our internal IT team were unsure of exactly what they needed to do. It’s now just much quicker.”

“It’s the same as the CACI helpdesk. I can grant them remote access to my desktop and they can fix issues instantly. There’s no more logging the issues with our internal IT department and hoping that someone can fix it quickly. It just gets done now.”

Finally, there’s the issue of cost benefit and cost efficiency. “The people operating above us, who sign off on expenditure such as this, can see the value in the service and are supportive of us using it, so there has been no issue on that front,” concludes Helen. “We have to justify the value, of course, but in terms of security, data access and space saved, it satisfies this. Our council understands the cost benefit of this and we’ve got support for it internally.”

For more information on how CACI’s fully managed hosting service supports youth justice services, please click here.

What do you get from your education software provider?

Posted on: 5 October 2023

The education software and integrated systems that you use to underpin your education services and processes are vital to the effective and efficient operation and oversight of your services. From early years to admissions and transfers, SEND/ALN to virtual school services, technology plays a fundamental role in efficient, effective and fair educational services to meet increasingly complex objectives. But what are your services getting from your software providers? From initial training through to ongoing support and maintenance, your providers play an important role themselves in sustaining your services.

Selecting the right technology means selecting the right partner. It’s not simply a case of buying a system and then switching it on. There’s an implementation to be planned and programmed, data to be exported, cleansed and imported. Then there are ongoing support needs and updates required over time to keep the system secure, compliant and supporting your evolving needs.

Getting started with your education software

Once a decision has been made, how are you going to get your team up to speed with your new education software? Ensuring that training is included in the procurement process is essential. So too is agreeing costs for any extra sessions, such as training and development.

Running parallel to this is ensuring that the configuration of local process covers everything you need. We’ve seen many cases where authorities have purchased the minimum viable product to meet procurement thresholds. They’ve then found layer upon layer of additional cost once they’ve gone live. These costs cover anything from additional infrastructure to third party licence agreements in order to get the system working.

Understanding these hidden extras can greatly help in gaining a more accurate cost of your education software. Building upon minimum viable products can be timely as well as expensive. Mapping this all out can minimise friction and disruption upon implementation. Better still, identifying a partner which has the experience and capability to work with local issues out of the box brings everything into scope upfront. Understanding how ongoing changes will be managed further helps to achieve your objectives over time.

How will your education software be updated?

Another issue we see repeatedly is the downtime associated with upgrades and maintenance. This covers everything from enhancements to the software to critical security patches. Standalone systems can help with this. They can help in greatly reducing the time your software is unavailable for. Any necessary work can also be conducted at times that best suit you.

Where your education software is linked to another piece of software within the same suite of products, updating one facet requires the downtime of everything else, too. So, for example, if your education software provider needs to update another system that is entirely unrelated to education and the work you do, but sits on the same architecture, it will mean that your software will be unavailable whilst their systems are updated.

IMPULSE Nexus – what you see is what you get

CACI has designed its IMPULSE Nexus education software to suit the needs of local authorities like yours. It is modular by design, so you can pick up and plug in the parts that you need. This means you’re free to use as much or as little of IMPULSE Nexus as your needs require.

All our pricing is upfront and transparent. You don’t have to pay for the bits of the software that you don’t need. This helps you manage your overarching software ecosystem that can use IMPULSE Nexus as part, or the heart of it.

Like everyone else, we do conduct upgrade work to IMPULSE Nexus. As a standalone system, however, we can work with you on the best time to conduct these. There are three every year, so there’s always advance warning and time to make arrangements. We also offer a hosting solution which means that we can carry out these upgrades for you as a fully managed service. This further reduces friction and minimises downtime.

Furthermore, as IMPULSE Nexus is a standalone system, any upgrade work won’t impact your integrated systems.

Where you need further support from the team at CACI, our costs are transparent and upfront. Our annual advisory service (AAS) days are bookable in advance or as and when you need them. These are designed to help you with everything from project management to additional training. You can find out more here.

IMPULSE Nexus is used by authorities across the UK, including Birmingham City Council. You can find out more about how it uses IMPULSE Nexus to handle its admissions process here.

If you would like more information on IMPULSE Nexus, please visit our website here.

SEND safety valve funding and the aim of inclusivity and integration

Posted on: 11 September 2023

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/

How CACI can help housing associations navigate the Social Housing Regulation Act

Posted on: 22 August 2023

On 20 July, the Social Housing Regulation Act received Royal Assent to become law. This places the social housing sector under increased scrutiny and introduces wide-ranging implications for how housing associations operate. The Act will:

Hold social housing providers responsible for new consumer standards, empowering tenants to provide the regulator stronger powers to hold landlords accountable.
Offer powers to the regulator to issue unlimited fines to rogue social landlords, creating a new risk for housing associations to manage customer engagement.
Enforce a closer working relationship between the ombudsman and the regulator. The ombudsman has emphasised the need for improved knowledge and information management across the sector and can enforce its recommendations more effectively through significant fines.

What transformational changes will housing associations need to consider implementing?

Housing Associations have several operational touchpoints with customers, ranging from complaints, repairs, arrears teams and beyond. This means that data and information are siloed across housing associations, prohibiting organisations from effectively engaging with customers or meeting their needs and falling foul to the new laws.

Housing associations will need to improve data quality across customers and assets to meet these new standards set by the regulator and avoid fines. A complete, up-to-date and actionable view of customers will be essential to effectively engage with them.

How can CACI help?

CACI can support on these key first steps for housing associations. Our work with housing associations has revealed that they are experiencing issues across the board with siloed data, gaps in customer data and complications with data foundations.

CACI can drive value for housing associations and help them become compliant with new regulations through various methods of support, including:

Assessing risks, reviewing and transforming data management in line with Knowledge and Information Management: We provide the data foundations in line with new regulations and recommendations to reduce your data risks and conduct thorough data quality and architecture assessments to do so.
Recommending technology and data roadmaps: We offer insight into the best platforms, the processes needed to adapt to support data quality initiatives for your housing association to manage data and drive value across the organisation. This will help you achieve a single, unified view of residents in the community.
Understanding customers and assets: Our wealth of consumer and asset data supplies deeper insight into customers’ demographic, vulnerability and lifestyle variables, while asset and place-based data enhance your understanding of your homes and community.
Activating actionable and accurate insights: Tailor your propositions and engagement by building a profile of customers according to key organisational issues such as complaints and arrears. Our trusted asset and consumer insights will help you offer the right services to the right people, reducing cost and resources while supporting your customers.
Driving value to improve customer satisfaction: An embedded data strategy that will improve outcomes for your customers by harnessing the power of analyses and spatial platforms.

What’s next?

CACI will be leading roundtables for housing associations to discuss approaches and best practices for data quality and insights. These sessions will offer a platform to share challenges and resources on meeting the new standards to ensure that housing associations deliver more value and improved outcomes for customers.

Please reach out to Tom Clarke or Gina Bryden for further information.

How InView regenerated Croydon Health Services’ data capabilities

Posted on: 18 August 2023

Background:

Croydon Health Services NHS Trust is a mid-sized hospital in Croydon that provides acute and community care through services and departments ranging from A&E, adult and paediatric critical care to outpatient and inpatient treatment and community services.

Prior to partnering with CACI over a decade ago, the Trust did not have their own data warehouse. Their in-house and bespoke systems were built using tools like Microsoft Access and SQL Server, which challenged their ability to load their structured data properly and time-efficiently. As a result, the Trust conducted a tender to enlist support for this, and after gauging the simplicity and ease with which CACI could help them meet their data warehouse optimisation needs, established a partnership.

Challenge:

Croydon Health Services’ entire in-house, bespoke system had been run by one person. This presented a risk to the organisation, particularly in the event of any changes made to statutory submissions or to the Healthcare Resource Group (HRG).

Husein Kermali, Head of Information Systems at Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, explained the Trust’s thinking in opting for a more organised route that would guarantee their protection by working with an organisation as opposed to an individual to oversee the entire system.

“One of our reasons we chose to go with [an organisation-led] warehouse in the first place was so things like the HRG group, the statutory submissions and anything that comes online from us from an NHS perspective would be something that we knew that warehouse would be capable of delivering.”

Solution:

The Trust implemented InView back in 2011-2012 as a one pass system. CACI created Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) processes through InView based on pre-existing system knowledge and an understanding of what Croydon Health Services endeavoured to do with their data from the point of partnership.

A few years later, in conjunction with their existing data provider, the Trust went from PIEDW extracts to Nautilus 835 extracts, which resulted in CACI taking over a significant amount of the ETL process for the Trust. The positive working relationship between the Trust and CACI built up the Trust’s confidence in the difference CACI could make for their data processing capabilities.

“We know that CACI is always there when we’ve got issues, we know that [CACI] knows the detailed processes very well. [CACI] also work for a multitude of Trusts… so they know they’ve seen all the issues that we’re having in other Trusts, and what all the Trusts are trying to do,” Husein explained. “I think with that kind of vision, [CACI] can see a lot more than we can. I think that makes CACI a great partner to be with.”

Results:

When the CDS010 was retired and 011 E CDS came online a few years ago, Husein flagged that “if [the Trust] did that in-house, that would have been a lot of work.” According to Husein, CACI had the extracts ready for this through InView, CACI’s modular data platform, easing Croydon Health Services’ involvement in the process.

“With the simple product upgrade of InView, [CACI] had all the elements within their product already. We just had to populate the fields that we needed. The output that was delivered was then ECDS 011 compliant, which saved us a lot of time,” Husein continued. “[CACI] did all the testing… we just had to make sure that we filled in the elements that we needed for the easy desk submission, so that was amazing because it saved a lot of time.”

Croydon Health Services has also benefitted from being involved in the ETL process throughout its development by CACI. The supplementary documentation provided at the end of any piece of work with CACI has given the Trust unrestricted access to changes made through InView or ensuring that everything they wished to capture had indeed been included.

The Trust has applied their learnings from CACI’s processes to successfully implement their own data quality (DQ) reports and dashboards that highlight potential problems and look up issues through a warehouse load process. The processes followed by their Data Quality team have also ensured that when data now goes through to the data warehouse, those issues disappear.