Skip to main content
Contact
Get in touch

CACI’s Impulse education management information system integrates with Wonde to provide secure data sharing

Debbie Lenthall

CACI is delighted to announce that it has partnered with Wonde to deliver safe and secure data sharing between its Impulse education management information system, local authorities and their schools. Being able to access data in such a way is vital in effectively utilising it to understand and improve outcomes for all young people of school age. The integration with Wonde will enable Impulse customers to make the best possible use of their data in an easy, seamless manner without worrying about concerns around data safety. 

“We’re excited to be partnering with Wonde as it will support Impulse customers in sending and receiving vital information on the young people in their services,” says Phil Lucy, director at CACI. “The integration will enable Impulse customers to make the most of the data available to them. For example, this will be particularly useful in our virtual schools module, enabling local authorities to receive near real-time information regarding pupil attendance at school. This then facilitates accurate and prompt action where required.” 

“Wonde are committed to ensuring schools and local authorities can securely access the data they need to support young people effectively,” says Ben Sinclair, Head of Data Sync at Wonde. “Our partnership with CACI strengthens that mission, providing Impulse customers with real-time insights that enable timely interventions and better outcomes for pupils. Together, we’re helping schools and services work more efficiently, with the young person always at the centre.”  

What Impulse customers will benefit from with our Wonde partnership 

  • An automated process with real-time updates 
  • Remove the need for manual sharing of data between schools and local authorities; no more emails, spreadsheets and phone calls 
  • Enhanced data security 

If you’re already an Impulse customer, please speak to your account manager for more information on using Wonde with Impulse. For more information on Impulse, please visit: www.caci.co.uk/software/impulse 

—-

Wonde is a leading provider of cloud-based school data management solutions, simplifying secure connections between schools and third-party applications.

By automating data transfers and eliminating manual processes, Wonde helps schools embrace technology with ease. Seamlessly integrating with Management Information Systems (MIS), Wonde delivers timely, accurate data while upholding the highest security standards. Trusted by over 30,000 schools across 60 countries, Wonde empowers educators to focus on teaching, ensuring data remains accessible, reliable, and secure. 

Case study

How Zero Gravity use Acorn to support underrepresented students

Zero Gravity logo

Summary

Zero Gravity is a digital platform connecting low-income students in years 12 and 13 with undergraduate mentors for app-based mentoring into highly selective universities. Zero Gravity has previously worked with CACI to enrich their understanding of the backgrounds of thousands of applicants through CACI’s Acorn. This is a geodemographic segmentation of the wider UK population used to assess students’ socio-economic backgrounds based on their postcodes.

Company size

50

Industry

Education

Products used

Acorn

Challenge

Matching social and economic needs with educational and career opportunities is one of the major challenges that Zero Gravity has sought to address.

Every year, around 50,000 students from socially mobile backgrounds achieve top GCSEs. However, only a third of these students make it to highly selective universities, and even fewer progress into top graduate careers. This discrepancy underscores a prevalent issue: while talent is evenly distributed across socio-economic backgrounds, opportunity is not.

The underrepresentation of socially mobile talent at elite universities and in prestigious careers is not due to a lack of ability. Instead, factors such as the “Network Advantage” (the intangible advantage of having access to a broad professional network identified in Zero Gravity’s Gap Zero report), resource shortages and imposter syndrome often hold these students back. The challenge for Zero Gravity is to bridge this gap, ensuring that talent from low-opportunity backgrounds can access the education and careers they deserve.

Solution

To address this challenge, Zero Gravity developed a sophisticated ‘potential identification system’ to identify and support socially mobile talent. A key component of this algorithm is the integration of contextual student profiling from Acorn. Insights drawn from Acorn provide a granular understanding of the socio-economic environment faced by students at home, enabling Zero Gravity to accurately evaluate their academic potential and their challenges.

By combining this information with Zero Gravity’s own academic performance data, the algorithm indexes top-performing students within the bottom groups of social advantage. This allows Zero Gravity to connect with socially mobile talent at the earliest stages of their educational journey.

By providing rich socio-economic insights, Acorn enhances the precision of Zero Gravity’s talent identification process, ensuring that support is directed towards students who are not only high achieving, but also from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Results

In the most recent academic cycle, Zero Gravity has achieved remarkable success by helping over 8,000 students from low-opportunity backgrounds secure places at top-tier universities – all free of charge – due to the social value the organisation drives. Notably, 800 of these students gained admission to Oxford and Cambridge, both of which rank among the top 10 higher education institutions globally. Additionally, Zero Gravity has launched the Zero Gravity Fund, directing nearly £1.5 million towards scholarships for its latest cohort of students.

The success of the current model has enabled Zero Gravity to focus on other opportunities to support disadvantaged students. The university mentoring platform has been such a success that they’ve now developed an innovative new service to help students into the workplace following graduation. Zero Gravity now pairs these young people with industry mentors and provides them with tailored support to access leading universities and, ultimately, successful careers. This enhanced approach not only equips students with the tools and guidance needed to reach their full potential but also contributes to a more diverse and inclusive talent pipeline for employers.

Learn more about Acorn

Case studies

Case study

Accelerating Youth Justice innovation for Youth Justice Services Cheshire

Summary

Youth Justice Services in Cheshire (covering Cheshire East and West, Halton and Warrington) is one of the largest youth offending teams in the country covering four local authorities. The service benefits from a future-focused, multi-agency and multi-professional youth justice system that complies with the YJB AssetPlus framework, whilst supporting data exchange with 3rd party systems.

Industry

Education

Products used

Challenge

Youth Justice Services in Cheshire is at the forefront of multiagency innovation with initiatives such as their liaison and diversion services, public protection management, safeguarding and complex-needs boards. Such initiatives depend on timely and effective intelligence and information exchange between multiple agencies that can be accessed securely at any time from a wide range of locations and networks.

Solution

CACI is working with Youth Justice Services in Cheshire, through the recently launched Centre of Excellence partnership, to explore new ways of organising and accessing common data. So far this has involved integrating data from a number of sources across the four local authorities and piloting a new mobile app to enable partner agencies to input case data through a single interface.

Results

CACI’s partnership with Youth Justice Services in Cheshire has helped to better serve young people and their families and generate better life outcomes at lower cost. This is delivered through innovation in the way in which they manage their service and information exchange across the four local authorities, irrespective of political imperatives and priorities.

Youth carer comforting a teenager in distress

Case studies

Case study

How CACI’s data supported the University of St Andrews

University of St Andrews logo

Summary

St Andrews, on the east coast of Scotland, is a unique and captivating place. The university is a key part of its charm. Founded in 1413, the University of St Andrews is known for its rich history as well as cutting edge teaching and research. More than 10,000 students attend the university, including around 8,000 undergraduates from Scotland, the rest of the UK and overseas. St Andrews is consistently ranked in the top three UK universities and the best in Scotland.

Company size

200

Industry

Education

Products used

Acorn

Challenge

Jonathan McDougall-Bagnall is the Planning Innovation and Infrastructure Manager at the university. He explains: “The data project is part of our contextual admissions policy launched several years ago. We are constantly striving to widen access to our institution and ensuring that it remains accessible to all. Historically we have used SIMD (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation) data and school performance data to identify candidates in Scotland who may require the support of our contextual admissions policy. We wanted to widen this to applicants from around the UK and needed to find suitable equivalent data. Each UK country calculates their index in a slightly different way, so we couldn’t make a direct comparison.”

Solution

The St Andrews team researched the data sources available and concluded that Acorn was the most comprehensive, accurate and current dataset for their needs.

“We use the Acorn postcode database as an integral part of our decision making system, to help us determine which candidates come from areas of deprivation,” says Jonathan. “We have the database and the profiler software, though we mainly use the database directly. The data is simply structured and easy to use, it comes in the same format every year. It’s very straightforward to pull into our systems, because of the consistent format and quality.”

Results

Joanna Fry, Access Manager: Widening Access & Transitions, says: “Our admissions system includes codes attributed to socio-economic deprivation and other widening access criteria, drawn from Acorn data and other sources.

“Both the admissions team and our academic colleagues can now look at students in groups and compare peer groups of those with similar access codes. This gives us vital context to benchmark students from similar environments and circumstances. For example, it can help us interpret the range of exams they’ve taken; the candidate‘s school may not have a wide range of subjects on offer. It also can help us understand how personal statements and references are written, depending on the influences and level of support that a candidate may have had.”

Find out more about Acorn

Case studies

Case study

University of Bath improves student outcomes through Synergy 4

University of Bath logo

Summary

For universities, the past few years have brought funding caps and freezes, a shift in the political landscape and an increased pressure to adapt to the changing needs of new students. In March 2019, a new government report was released proposing a number of changes that mean universities are under further pressure to adapt and evolve in delivering that quality education.

Industry

Education

Products used

Synergy

Challenge

Costing

Bringing in new students and improving the retention and graduation rates are all areas which are intrinsically linked to a university’s costs and funding. With this in mind, the University of Bath went to tender for a costing solution that would allow them to go beyond TRAC and take a more advanced approach to costing analysis.

Insight

Up to this point, the finance team at Bath University had been running costing activity on Excel spreadsheets, meaning the process was very manual, time consuming, and the output was kept simple. While the simplicity meant it was easy to change, the volume of time spent on processing the data meant there was little, or none left to spend on gathering insightful analysis.

Strategy

Their objective was to implement a solution that would give a more granular view, better insight and enable future improvements. The ability to calculate exact costs of modules, teaching and research, Bath believed would ultimately allow for more effective and strategic decisions at the board level.

Solution

CACI had been appointed by Bath University as a result of the tender and proposed Synergy 4 as the best solution to realise the changes and insight Bath was looking for. Synergy 4 would enable strategic decision making and produce clear, actionable insights across the institution.

For many universities, this detailed level of costing analytics was still relatively new, however this wasn’t a new concept for CACI. The business intelligence team had been delivering Synergy across the UK in the NHS for years, to allow them to cost at a patient level for their regular mandated submissions.

Alongside Synergy were Microsoft Power BI visualisations, to enable Bath to not just calculate costs at the module level, but to produce accessible and digestible reports that could be easily used to support accurate decision making at many levels of the university. This would create a positive change for Bath, to see their TRAC submission summaries transformed into detailed reports that allowed for full clarity at a deep dive level.

Results

Since implementing this solution, the university has seen a number of benefits. At a localised level the manual processes have been eliminated, meaning the finance team can focus on deep dive financial analysis, allowing for key insights to be derived from the data. 

Bath University can now make confident data driven decisions, knowing they have all the information. It can consider all of the data driving cost and income, not just the top levels of activity. This has allowed it to identify opportunities to improve its model and make recommendations for changes that will support delivering better education options for students. 

Synergy continues to provide insights for Bath which generate conversations and action plans across the University into what the next improvement for students will be. 

With this information Bath now have insight that allow them to make data driven decisions such as: 

  • Course mix changes 
  • Competitive price setting for non-regulated fees
  • Benchmarking against other universities
  • Maximising use of their estate across the whole campus
Learn more about Synergy

Case studies

Case study

How Tameside Council uses ChildView’s full case data exchange functionality

Summary

Tameside Council has been using CACI’s ChildView since 2014 to support its vital work in supporting vulnerable young people across its services. One specific area of functionality within ChildView that the Council finds particularly useful is the full case data exchange.

Industry

Education

Products used

ChildView

Challenge

The full case data exchange functionality enables Tameside Council to share and receive all the data held on a young person’s case. “It was taking so long to manually input the data associated with a full case,” explains Louise Hope, Data and Analysis Lead. “Our business support function has been getting busier, with more work in referrals meetings and taking notes, resulting in less time for admin tasks such as this. We put together a business case for using the full case data exchange functionality and implemented it.”

“Essentially, we wanted to save time. It has also helped us to improve the accuracy of our data; the data otherwise is only as good as the person inputting it. If they make mistakes and miss things, then our data is poorer as a result.”

Solution

The full case data exchange functionality in ChildView enables youth justice services to send and receive all data recorded on a young person with other youth offending teams (YOTs) using ChildView. If young people move services, their record can move with them.

“We use it to send and receive cases with other YOTs,” says Louise. “We would like to use it for everything but have found that there is some confusion around the process with other YOTs, whereby they only send us the asset rather than the full case. Once other YOTs understand the process, it will improve it further.”

Results

One of the main benefits of the functionality is to save time and improve efficiency. At a time when services are getting busier, this is a helpful facet of the full case data exchange. “Absolutely we’ve saved time through using the functionality,” says Louise. “Although it’s tough to say exactly how much time because each case is a different size. I would say, however, that we save at least a couple of hours on a standard case. Also, if the data is being input manually, we would never ask someone to add all contacts, for example; they would be attached as a pdf. So, we get a richer base of information whilst saving an average of two hours.”

A richer base of information helps YOTs to pick up information more easily and understand the context and nuance of a young person’s journey. Where information gets lost or incorrectly recorded, vital information disappears with it. “It’s certainly beneficial to have all of the information and all of the contacts,” concludes Louise.

Learn more about ChildView

Case Studies

Case study

How Milton Keynes Youth Offending Team uses ChildView to support its work

Summary

Milton Keynes Youth Offending Team is part of the multi-agency youth justice partnership involving Milton Keynes Council, Thames Valley Police, Education and Public Health. The team began using ChildView, CACI’s specialist youth offending information system, in 2009, following migration from their previous YOIS System. ChildView is used by 31 multi-disciplinary workers at Milton Keynes Council and the team has 160 active youth justice cases at the time of writing.

Industry

Education

Products used

ChildView

Challenge

As the Youth Offending Team used a system of spreadsheets to process and record information, they realised that ChildView would provide an integrated whole service recording and reporting solution to reduce and enhance oversight across cases and referrals into and out of its services.

“ChildView can hold all the information we need and allow active case management,” says Phil Coles, Business Support and Information Manager at the Milton Keynes Youth Offending Team. “I know some YOTs have issues with aspects of their youth justice work. Generally, I’ve found that these issues are due to not having defined business processes that support (or dictate) the recording practices. Using a system like ChildView helps us to define our processes, whilst maintaining all our data in the same place.”

“An example of this is the active management of referrals. By using agreed recording processes, we can instantly see which cases have been referred to another agency and whether they have reviewed the case yet. Then we can see when they accept the case and, finally, when they complete their work for us. This used to be managed in folders, then it became a spreadsheet but – by mapping processes – we’ve now got it to a single ChildView report which has a variety of views for each type of referral and whether it’s active or complete. We are also able to provide all stats that have been requested so far, for example how many referrals have been made (or completed) during a period.”

Need to upgrade from using spreadsheets to process and record information

Integrate whole service recording to reduce and enhance oversight across case and referrals

Solution

“I’ve always had excellent support from CACI when making queries or raising issues,” says Phil. “There have been times when a resolution has taken time to arrive at, but they are always worked on. Raising queries is very straightforward and the team is always quick to respond.” 

CACI, as part of its service level agreement, responds to all ChildView support queries received by 5 p.m. on the same day. This helps clarify how issues and queries are dealt with and provides practical next steps. The support desk is staffed from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday to Friday, with 24/7 web support call logging available as well.

Results

With the underlying importance of the complex work increasingly undertaken by the team, risks can be captured and tracked in near real time. This facilitates holistic case formulation to ensure vulnerable young people in the area achieve the best possible responses. To this end, being able to report on activities and send and receive data in real time on incidents and cases is vital. 

“I have written about 150 reports, many of which contain multiple views, and have found that ChildView facilitates rapid access to information for myself and my team,” says Phil. “We are able to store all necessary documents within the application and are just looking at using the communications module to further integrate letters into the system.” 

ChildView’s built-in reporting functionality has also supported Milton Keynes YOT. “It’s sufficient for the majority of requests that we receive,” adds Phil. This helps meet the service’s needs, with relevant information captured in locally-defined reports. ChildView also uniquely transfers whole case data records between YOTs, increasing accuracy and reducing the effort and risk in tracking young people as they move localities. 

Being able to send, receive and view the full case management story, relational history and context swiftly and securely simplifies YOT’s engagement and formulation of an effective response with incoming cases, innately understanding each young person’s circumstance. 

Learn more about ChildView

Case Studies

Case study

Hackney Youth Justice service – A single citizen record

Summary

Hackney Youth Justice Service works with multiple agencies in the London Borough of Hackney to reduce youth offending and reoffending, and mitigate the impact of crime on families, communities and victims. Information sharing between these agencies is critical to managing the risks and vulnerabilities associated with young people, their families and the community.

Industry

Education

Products used

ChildView

Challenge

Hackney Youth Justice Service stores files about young people in its service using a document management system, Open Text eDocs. Adding data to this system was very manual and time consuming, and involved sourcing information from multiple systems. This opened up the risk of error and sharing the wrong information with the wrong people, as well as making data sharing very difficult.

Manual and time-consuming process involving multiple systems

Potential risk of error and compliance issues

Difficulty with data sharing with relevant people

Solution

CACI integrated eDocs with the ChildView youth justice application, ensuring all documents are accessed from a single source. Integration works both ways, so when a file is added to eDocs it is immediately added to the person record in ChildView.

The system is used by youth offending workers to access documents from across the council and other agencies including social care and health services.

Results

Since adding an integration layer between eDocs and ChildView, Hackney Youth Justice Service has been able to save considerable time in storing, sharing and acting on information. And because documents are now stored in one place, they have also been able to save on IT storage and associated costs.

Learn more about ChildView

Case studies

Case study

Brighton and Hove’s Children’s Centres

Summary

Brighton and Hove’s Children’s Centres did not have a centralised Management Information System. They approached CACI to help establish a new, more efficient process.

Company Size

N/A

Industry

Education

Products Used

Challenge

Brighton and Hove’s data was managed in an ad-hoc manner, primarily using Excel spreadsheets. This made the production of accurate reports a very labour and time-intensive task.

Like all Children’s Centres teams across the country, Brighton and Hove were facing an ever-increasing dependence on the production of quality information, to demonstrate their impact to Ofsted and to help shape service delivery in the future.

Brighton and Hove also recognised the importance of establishing a robust process around the chosen system, ensuring that all Centres were using it in a uniform way, with a Central Administration team managing core data and producing central reports.

Production of reports are manual and time-consuming

Increased need on production of quality information

Need central management of core data and reporting

Solution

Brighton and Hove City Council ran a competitive tendering process in which CACI’s Children’s Centre Manager (CCM) system demonstrated the unique ability to tailor the solution to satisfy their needs. Following the tendering process and contract award, Brighton & Hove worked closely with CACI to ensure that the implementation of the system was a success and enabled a uniform set of activities to be designed and defined by their associated KPI targets.

As well as the core functionality around managing families, services and attendances, Case Work and Reporting, Brighton and Hove also purchased two additional modules – Barcoding and Messaging, which allow for time-saving around attendance recording through the implementation of barcoded registers and membership cards. To enable the Centres to identify specific groups and send pertinent messages (e.g. details of the next smoking cessation course to ‘Smoking Parents’) the Text Messaging module has also been implemented.

Results

Brighton and Hove’s Children’s Centres’ integration with Health led to information on new births being directly imported into the CCM on a regular basis. This resulted in greater data accuracy, substantial time saving on data input and the ability to easily combine data sets across NHS and Council systems. CACI developed a procedure which handles this upload automatically; skilfully and patiently negotiating the data security protocols of two large, public organisations.

The solution resulted in standardisation of attendance data across the entire service, which has meant a systematic approach to assessing performance, more confident completion of OFSTED Self Evaluation Forms and better transparency and accountability to the Advisory Groups that govern each centre.

Learn more about Children’s centre manager

Case studies

Case study

How Monkey Puzzle enriched their customer insight with accurate demographic data

Summary

Monkey Puzzle is the UK’s largest day nursery franchise network, with over 60 nurseries nationwide. For over thirty years, the Monkey Puzzle team has worked closely with parents, staff and Ofsted to deliver childcare of the highest quality, providing children aged three months to five years with unlimited opportunities to learn, develop and grow within a safe, secure and caring environment.

An award-winner in the 2020 Day Nurseries Top 20, Monkey Puzzle is growing strongly. It’s always looking for new franchise sites and opportunities, led by a dedicated head office team. Monkey Puzzle also operates a handful of day nurseries directly, providing a benchmark of best practice for franchisees.

Company Size

1,000

Industry

Education

Products Used

Challenge

Understanding the opportunities in franchise locations with enriched local customer insight. Sophie Hailey, Monkey Puzzle’s Franchising and Property Acquisitions Associate, explains:

“Before we engaged with CACI, when we were looking at a new site, the only demographic research we would do was competitor analysis. We would type the site postcode into the OFSTED website and look at comparable sites in a five mile radius. We would mystery shop them to find out about what they offered, the fees and waiting lists, to help us establish a suitable proposition and pricing for our potential new nursery.”

“When you visit a site, you can get a good feel for a location. This is really important, as is the competitor research, but we needed more information and evidence to back up our decisions, as our network expands. We wanted to give our franchisees confidence as well as committing to the right sites for our model. The more relevant insight we have, the better our decisions can be.”

Solution

Sophie talked to CACI about Monkey Puzzle’s franchising and the kind of information that was important in her decision-making process. Acorn and InSite reporting would give Sophie and the team access to valuable customer demographic and local market information to enrich their understanding of new and existing sites and opportunities in the local area. She explains:

“The site reports we generate help us to narrow down potential sites quickly – we look at a number of factors about the catchment that tell us whether it’s worth investigating a proposed site further. We can see how close it is to existing sites, so we can avoid cannibalisation, as well as how strong the customer demand might be in the local community and workforce.”

Results

With InSite and Acorn, Sophie and her colleagues have a clear, shared knowledge base that informs the franchise development process with consistent and up-to-date customer and location information.

As the first person in the decision process, Sophie saves not only her own time, but that of colleagues. “For some sites, it’s an obvious yes or no, but sometimes the decision is more difficult,” she shares. “A lot of properties proposed to us are undifferentiated. With decisive information upfront, I can avoid setting lots of people off to do work on a site that’s more likely to fall through.”

The maps mean Monkey Puzzle can take a more proactive approach to franchise searches. “We can identify gaps in our coverage areas and prioritise those with the most promising customer mix in the catchment,” she continues.

Working with new franchisees, Sophie can show them information about the types of household and persona that comprise most of Monkey Puzzle’s customers. It helps them understand who they’re catering for, where they live and what matters to them when the new franchisee is planning services and communication.

Find out more about Acorn and InSite.

Case studies