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

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 started using Childview, a specialist youth offending information system from CACI, 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.

The administrative problems solved by ChildView

The youth offending team at Milton Keynes Council was using a system of spreadsheets to process and record information. The team 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 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.”

The benefits of ChildView for Milton Keynes YOT

With the underlying importance of the complex work increasingly undertaken by the team, this enables risks to 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.”

The built-in reporting functionality with ChildView has also supported Milton Keynes YOT. “It’s sufficient for the majority of requests that we receive,” adds Phil. This helps to meet the needs of the service, with relevant information being captured in locally defined reports. ChildView also uniquely transfers whole case data records between YOTs, which increases accuracy and reduce 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 makes it much easier for YOTs to engage and formulate an effective response with incoming cases, crucially being able to understand what has happened to each young person.

Support from CACI’s specialist team

“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 5pm on the same day. This helps to give clarity over how issues and queries are dealt with and to provide practical next steps. The support desk is staffed from 9-5:30 Monday to Friday, with 24/7 web support call logging available as well.

“Myself and my team have generally found ChildView to be easy to use,” concludes Phil. “It does what we need it to do and I haven’t been asked for anything that I haven’t been able to get out of the system.”

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