“There is an urgent need to better understand the cumulative impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on health outcomes across the life course, integrating epidemiology with fields including epigenetics, immunology and neurology. Equally, there is a critical need for knowledge on how services can become more trauma-informed, what impact trauma-informed service delivery can have, and how services for children and families affected by child maltreatment, substance abuse, domestic violence or incarceration, for instance, can be better integrated to provide a cohesive offer.” The Lancet Research Report, Volume 6, Number 11, November 2021

The annual cost associated with the nine health conditions, including violence and four health risks resulting from ACEs, has been estimated at £2.2 billion per annum in Wales.

In several service areas, notably education and youth offending, there is emerging awareness of the impact of trauma upon populations. However, there is limited evidence of the cost effectiveness of trauma informed service interventions and, therefore, there are difficulties in building and sustaining such services, including prevention. This is in part due to the variation in definitions and understandings of trauma and trauma informed practice. More work remains to be done on this emerging area of practice.

Further, there is a challenge in applying research to real lives. The 10 flat ACE categories fail to account for wider adverse experiences and the cumulative and dynamic effects of adversity and associated trauma, as noted by Dr Alex Chard in his 2021 paper, Punishing Abuse. Similarly, service assessment tools have typically failed to fully captured the age timeline details and context of historical adversity and trauma events. This adds to the difficulty of seeing where needs have not been identified earlier and where unmet needs interact with earlier vulnerabilities such as with universal service environments, decisions and outcomes.

Further, point in time screening and assessment tools do not allow an evaluation of the difference that can be made by applying trauma awareness, skills and approaches in support services as well as specialist interventions such as enhanced case management (ECM).

The findings from the recent public health research, Tackling ACEs: State of the Art and Options for Action, point to further adaptations that can be delivered to allow structured recording of adversity and trauma experiences to be more fully and consistently used to provide feedback to service leaders. Further, these arrangements can overcome the practical and ethical problems associated with ACE screening and enable routine reporting and evaluation of efforts to respond to adversity and trauma, for example in youth justice (and perhaps virtual schools) services. The same arrangements can also facilitate effective and sustained multi agency prevention around universal services in education.

However, it seems that children’s services at this time experience significant challenges in implementing statutory safeguarding and other statutory services for Children Looked After and Special Educational Needs. Many service areas are generating high costs without achieving better care or outcomes. Alongside this are workforce challenges of retention, sufficient stability and consistency of skills. Whilst these issues demand leadership time they can also draw attention away from developing the necessary longer term aligned service solutions.

So, what can be done against this backdrop? At CACI we accept that technology can make a significant contribution to the challenges, however, where and how information management is applied, implemented and supported can make a difference to facilitating and ameliorating outcomes or, in fact, becoming part of the problem, for example being overly focussed on process efficiencies to reduce staff and silo costs versus enabling aligned, coordinated and sustained effective multi professional relational helping capability.

The public health research makes evident the very significant long-term socio-economic costs that include:

• Avoidable costs of social care and health services
• Increased costs of special educational needs
• Harm to individuals and communities from anti-social behaviour, violence and other crime
• Loss of human capital and educational potential
• Lost cost from providing services not aligned to reducing adversity or ameliorating harm
• Lost taxes and productivity through lower economic activity, ill health and early death

Further, the recommendations are clear about the need to capture child development and real life adversity and trauma event data alongside service responses and child journeys. The overarching goal will be to use this data operationally to discover where tailored multi service practice responses to individual, familial and local community issues and contexts deliver a sustainable positive impact.

“Increasing the methodological consistency of data collection, particularly in children, would help to promote early prevention, inform the provision of support, evidence the impact of prevention, and evaluate progress.” Tackling ACEs: State of the Art and Options for Action

A key challenge is achieving the alignment of universal services, effective multi professional prevention and early help responses.

Population data is increasingly available about the high costs of adversity and trauma accrued over the life course and could be considered in guidance, oversight and regulation of individual service decisions and options. This can be the next challenge for information system designers.

How does a challenging economy affect consumer choices and priorities that shape the UK market for elderly care?

It’s no surprise that the cost of living squeeze is having an impact on elderly care operators. Private residential and domestic care cost money: consumers are looking for ways to economise. Older people want and need comfort and care as much as ever, but they and their families are tightening their belts. Inevitably, they’re considering the cost of different care settings and options.

What does this mean for residential and domiciliary care providers? It’s early days, but as for every other consumer sector, you need to be prepared for the market to change. A proactive approach to understanding current and future customers and modelling potential demand in your locations can uncover opportunities to maintain occupancy and optimise your services to match evolving priorities and needs.

If you don’t have a crystal ball to hand, that may sound like a tall order. But knowing and anticipating market demand in your locations doesn’t depend on magic or guesswork. Consumer and location data together provide reliable evidence that can help you identify ways to stay relevant, accessible and financially stable.

Not all groups are impacted to the same extent by the rising costs of living. The majority of Acorn Groups still have a sizeable disposable income despite the recent 5% average fall.

Source: CACI Paycheck Disposable Income 2022 v2

Despite the bleak headlines, the economic impact varies considerably for different household types and in different areas. Many older consumers still have savings, disposable income or assets that allow them to choose the care they want. If you can understand the profile of your current and future customers in detail, it’s easier to identify and reach out to local prospects.

Location intelligence data is a well-established source of insight for care home operators and domestic care providers that are considering expansion or new sites. Mapping the age and affluence of the local population in a potential catchment helps to indicate where there’s likely demand for elderly care services.

But alongside age and income, there’s a lot of more subtle data that can help you market your existing services, confirm or reshape your propositions, benchmark your pricing and adjust the range and type of services you offer. This type of insight is extremely useful in a fast-changing market.

CACI data insights can answer crucial questions about your customers and market:

• What are the characteristics of your local and target customers? Acorn profiling groups UK consumers by affluence, life stage and priorities
• What are your current and potential customers thinking, feeling and intending to do differently Quarterly Consumer insight surveys of the UK population
• How has customer spending on different outgoings changed? Transactional spending data shows the split of spend with different brands and operators
• Whose disposable income is affected? Postcode model of income in different locations, showing how it’s being spent.
• What’s around the corner? Dynamic modelling forecasts what could happen to consumer spending if inflation, fuel and other costs rise in a range of different ways

CACI’s current disposable income model reflects the changes we’ve observed in the last few months. Although all households are affected by rising costs, the majority of our Acorn consumer profile groups still have a significant disposable income. It’s groups like Student Life and City Sophisticates that have seen the largest decline, driven by property costs.

There has been major growth in spend on private healthcare, with a wide range of demographics prioritising health over other non-essential spending.

Source: CACI Transactional Spend, June 2022

For elderly care operators, it’s encouraging to note that Comfortable Seniors, Countryside Communities and Successful Suburbs, who are likely to form far more of the target market, have some of the highest levels of disposable income, reflecting smaller or non-existent mortgages, good pensions and comfortable savings accrued over previous years.

Spending on private healthcare has increased in the past year. The Covid-19 pandemic and concerns about NHS waiting lists are driving this change in priorities for households across most Acorn groups. Despite rising essential costs, many consumers now regard healthcare expenditure as a necessity, not a luxury. This could have a positive impact on perceptions of value in elderly care.

These are just the headlines from our latest national data. Every elderly care provider has a different operating model and works in unique locations. CACI’s health and social care team can select data and build customised reports that directly reflect the opportunities and changes happening in your catchment areas today and tomorrow. For mid-sized operators, it’s vital decision-making information to inform strategy and tactical decisions that will help your business compete and thrive in a challenging economy.

We can help you:

• Continuously analyse, monitor and adapt – stay ahead of policy and new competitors when finding new customers and recruits
• Tailor marketing engagement and recruitment key messages to reflect the requirements of local potential pools of customers and staff
• Understand your staff and customer base and how its segments are impacted by different cost of living challenges, to identify risk and opportunity
• Tailor your offer to changing consumer and staff requirements

CACI’s specialist elderly care and senior living team work with clients in the UK and internationally to help them improve operational and financial performance with access to vital insights into their customers, employees and locations.

To find out more, contact us.

What does a good procurement process look like? Something we often see in the market are knee-jerk reactions. A problem within an organisation has been identified so a tender has gone out to market in a bid to rectify it. Whilst this can work, it pays to have an intimate understanding of what your problem is, how you would like to solve it and the impact the solution will have on your team and the future of your service.  

Ultimately, understanding your procurement needs is the first step of your new project.  

Once understanding is established, it makes life a lot easier (for you and a provider) when the implementation phase of the project gets underway. 

Understanding procurement to understand the project 

At CACI, we use our proprietary FUSION project management methodology to underpin every implementation that we deliver to customers. The first phase of this is to shape the project. Working closely with your team, we establish what the project will look like, what your needs are and what success will look like. This is the stage where buy-in needs to be established across your teams, from management to end-user levels.  

Having a fundamental understanding of why you’re purchasing a new technology solution makes this stage far more straightforward. It’s very difficult to elaborate on vague concepts and ideas. 

Helping your chosen technology provider to help you is half the battle: 

• What are the long-term, strategic aims of your service? 
• What areas of practice do you need the technology to assist with? 
• How will it positively impact your team? 
• How you will resource the project internally? 
• What timelines are you aiming to achieve? 
• How will training be conducted? 
• How will the system handle departures and new starters? 
• What do you want the system to look like in five years’ time? 

Starting with the why 

What do you want and why do you want it? It sounds like such a simple question, but a failure to grasp this point creates major issues over the lifecycle of a project. It makes it difficult to obtain buy-in internally, whilst making it difficult to explain to a provider what you need their technology to achieve for you. 

This needs consideration of everyone involved, from those responsible for the procurement through to those who will be working with the technology and service users. Across this spectrum, what does good look like? 

This is when knee-jerk reactions can hamper the success of a project, where it is deemed to be important to be implementing a system in response to a situation, rather than considering the value proposition and impact of new software thoroughly. If a decision has been made in haste, without due consideration as to how it will impact end users and service users, then the definition of success will likely deviate from the originally intended definition. They may well feel that the existing solution works well for them, too. Change management is another important consideration from the outset – FUSION change management. 

It is also important to understand your existing technology infrastructure. Often we see cases of competing influences within an organisation, whereby a decision is made as to the infrastructure based upon cost and/or convenience for the IT team. Whilst these are undoubtedly important considerations, it can leave organisations relying upon software which doesn’t meet the required outcomes for staff and end users. 

Understanding why you need new technology and focussing on those outcomes, before taking a tender to market, helps the lifecycle of the project. 

How CACI can help 

If you are looking for new solutions, it is worth speaking to providers before entering a formal procurement process. Of course, procurement needs to be conducted along specific guidelines set by your organisation but speaking to providers to gauge an understanding of their technology and how it might benefit your organisation is a good idea. 

Furthermore, at CACI we have worked with countless customers on implementation and project management. We developed FUSION based upon the understanding of project delivery accrued  over thousands of projects. We can work with you and your team outline how the project would be developed and delivered, outlining each step to help you achieve project buy-in across everyone affected. 

Procurement frameworks 

The final step, once you’ve understood what the project is and what success will look like, is understanding how you can procure. CACI is listed on several public service procurement frameworks. Going through this route can help to avoid lengthy tenders and legal wrangling over contracts. Talking to providers in advance will help in gathering this knowledge so that once you’re ready to move, the procurement process runs as smoothly as possible. 

One of the suggestions of the recent SEND review was to overhaul EHCPs. We take a look at how this can be done and what it will mean

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

What does the DfE want to do with EHCPs?

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

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

Sounds sensible, how will it work in practice?

The central hook upon which EHCPs will be hung going forward will be via a template provided by the DfE. This will standardise the information captured and make it easier for professionals to traverse each EHCP, simplifying the interpretation of the information within them and making it easier to input appropriately into each child’s journey.

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

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

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

This also makes the information pertaining to a child’s SEND status useful beyond the boundaries of education. For example, in a youth justice scenario, it’s useful for practitioners to have a complete view of the young people within their services. Having information on their SEND can be informative in painting a complete picture of their journey and understanding their life story.

Technology supporting the single view

In creating a fully digital EHCP, there is a tacit acknowledgement of the involvement of technology. The vast majority of schools, local authorities, parents and professionals have the ability to access and record information digitally. How the DfE will implement this will be the interesting point.

A number of different technology solutions exist across the education industry, so there’s no chance of every authority and school deploying the same software. Nor should there be. Each school and authority should be free to select the technology and partners that work best for them.

Where the DfE will need they systems to work for them is in regards of interoperability. How can the information in an EHCP be shared between systems in multi-agency scenarios?

Most systems support this, with the ability to establish the set of data fields that will be outlined by the DfE and can communicate with third party systems to send and receive information. This will be vital in achieving the SEND aims of the DfE for EHCPs.

Conclusion

Achieving this single view of a child is something that we fully support, and our recent white paper covers the topic across children’s services more broadly. In multi-agency scenarios, such as those presented by SEND, it is imperative that all parties can access and record information unilaterally whilst contributing to the ultimate goal of improved outcomes for children with SEND.

A standardised response to SEND and EHCPs will also make the entire process more transparent, without local interpretations causing issues for children moving schools, region or for professionals picking up disparate cases. The response to SEND should not depend upon where you live and the process should be transparent and consistent for everyone.

As a technology provider in the education sector, we have long seen the benefit of interoperability with third party software providers in the sector. The ability to send and receive data seamlessly creates efficiencies in the process that will be to the ultimate benefit of the end service user, in this case children with identified SEND.

Creating a rich, single view of every child can only be beneficial in data mapping, understanding behaviours and tackling the challenge of improving outcomes for all children. We too often see information, systems and processes siloed into regions and sectors, so the aims of the DfE are welcome in tackling this. Education is a right for all children and young people, ensuring that the process is open, fair and easy to understand makes it a lot easier for everyone.

Creating a single view of the SEND journey is an important step. Making their information available to the multiple agencies that interact with SEND children, will only enhance the ability of each agency to interpret and record data on them, sharing their professional insights with others involved in their journey.

Planning and scheduling the nursing workforce during the pandemic

Like so many industries and bodies, the NHS had to adapt in several ways during the Covid pandemic. The frontline of its efforts to tackle the virus made the headlines, but away from Covid wards there was a necessity for the NHS to adapt its processes and practices around the threat posed.

One such example regards district nursing – how was the NHS able to effectively and efficiently plan and schedule its nursing workforce in the face of meeting the challenge of delivering vital services away from hospitals?

In short, there was something of a struggle across some NHS Trusts to meet this challenge. The usual routine of bringing vulnerable patients into the hospital environment for the administration of care had to be reviewed in order to reduce the risk of exposure to Covid for such patients. This meant putting more nurses out on the road to deliver care in residences and care homes.

This change also fulfils part of the NHS’s Long Term Plan:

“Over the next 10 years, health and care will change significantly. We have a roadmap in the NHS Long Term Plan which sets out a new service model for the 21st century: increasing care in the community; redesigning and reducing pressure on emergency hospital services; more personalised care; digitally enabled primary and outpatient care; and a focus on population health and reducing health inequalities.”

NHS People Plan 2019

Increased demands for NHS Trusts

There was a sudden increase in demand for domestic patient visits thrust upon NHS Trusts with the Covid pandemic, meaning that processes and protocols had to be drawn up and adhered to in a short space of time.

The process of planning and scheduling district nurses to carry out these additional tasks meant that a vast number of clinical hours had to be diverted to scheduling and planning. On top of that, there was the inevitable rescheduling of appointments to contend with, too.

This is a largely manual process at present for many NHS Trusts, with others relying on old software which isn’t suitable for handling the modern scheduling demands of district nursing.

Operating hundreds of nurses to fulfil thousands of appointments in an efficient and effective manner is a huge undertaking. Doing this manually requires a monumental effort on the part of those responsible and using outdated software only makes the challenge harder.

Furthermore, each appointment must also take into consideration the skillset of the nurse conducting the appointment, ensuring that they are appropriately qualified to undertake the task. This requires careful planning and oversight and was a process that could be shattered in an instant with a positive Covid test for a district nurse.

Operating this manually, simply put, is unsustainable given the hours being diverted to it, the strain of efficiently managing the workloads of every district nurse and the requirement to consider each nurse’s competency for each visit. So, there is an opportunity to implement new technological systems which will bring about lasting benefits – the healthcare world will be a different place even once Covid is a memory.

Benefits of automated planning and scheduling software for NHS nursing

Automated planning and scheduling software can bring about a multitude of benefits for NHS district nursing including:

Reducing the clinical time spent on scheduling appointments

Automating the process massively reduces the workload, leaving administrative time to focus on exceptions

Reducing travel time and expenditure

Efficiently scheduling district nurses to maximise the number of appointments they can fulfil reduces the burden on the Trust by ensuring each nurse is fulfilling as many appointments as possible

Enabling demand and capacity modelling

Identifying demand gaps and knowing exactly how many district nurses are required at any given time based on actual demand

Supporting the identification of skill gaps

Spotting skill shortages based on future demand means a proactive and accurate approach to future workforce training and recruitment can be adopted

Meeting Lone Working Policy requirements

Where staff are working alone there is the potential for them to face hostile situations; having a robust system in place enables them to raise an alarm where such scenarios arise

Meeting requirements and patient demand

Increasing assurance that service delivery is meeting the requirements and needs of patient demand through automation. Reports can be generated to see the effectiveness of service delivery and to identify any shortfalls in staffing required to deliver services in line with patient demand

Reduction in missed or delayed visits (and associated clinical incidents)

By efficiently planning rosters, travel time allowances can be factored in, lowering the risk of external factors disrupting your schedule and making it more likely that appointments are met, reducing the risk of clinical incidents occurring as a result of staff scheduling

Improved communications with patients and carers for visits

Automate messaging through your system to inform patients and guide nurses

All these benefits from a system can be used to shape a more consistent and reliable future for NHS Trusts in delivering vital services.

CACI works across the UK with community care teams who use our Cygnum software to help deliver a huge range of centrally and domestically located services, helping to keep vital care and community services running. The software is also used by the Care Quality Commission to schedule their inspection workforce.

More families forced in poverty and the impact on children

There are practical concerns around the cost of living crisis for children in and around the poverty line. Children with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are far more likely to come from low income households. Some 37.2% of children who have identified SEND qualify for free school meals. 19.7% of pupils without SEND qualify.

Taking this further, 56.2% of looked after children (LAC) have identified SEND. The most common type of need for LAC is ‘social, emotional and mental health.’

In 2021, the last time statistics were published by the government on the subject, 80,850 children were LAC in England. This number steadily increases year on year, so it’s reasonable to predict that the cost of living crisis, in placing greater pressure upon families to support their children, will force many past breaking point and result in more LAC.

On top of this, 400,000 children are in the social care system. Again, in a time of social strife, it’s not unreasonable to predict a rise in this number, too.

How can our services react?

The obvious fix is money. Sadly, that’s unlikely to be forthcoming. From Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s mini-budget which did so much damage to the short term outlook of the UK economy, to current prime minister, Rishi Sunak exploring tax increases and public spending cuts, it’s clear that the government will be pursuing cuts in public spending in one form or another. A report from the Resolution Foundation economic think tank suggests that the government needs to find £40bn to rebalance the UK’s finances. Social care, youth justice and education will all be affected.

So, there won’t be any more money available to services that interact with vulnerable young people. As the report in The Evening Standard highlights, concern is now spreading away from those eligible for free school meals to those in the bracket just above them. To borrow another line from that report: “Up to 800,000 children in England live in households on universal credit that do not qualify for free school meals because their annual household earnings (excluding benefits) exceed £7,400, according to the Child Poverty Action Group. This risibly low threshold — of just £617 a month after tax — is applied by the Government irrespective of the number of children in the family and mostly impacts low-income working families.”

The social interpretation of ‘poverty’, as well as the literal one, requires redefining. That’s not something that can be achieved easily or quickly, so what can be done in the here and now?

Efficiency getting the most from available services

Efficiency is one way that services interacting with vulnerable children can, simply put, provide more services to more children. This will be vital in identifying and responding to children with SEND, as well as processing information on children such as their eligibility for free school meals and uniforms.

If staff are bogged down in administrative tasks, it impacts their ability to focus on improving outcomes for these children. What staff in children’s services are best at is helping those children achieve the best possible outcomes. If admin can be left to technology and automation, where possible, this helps to free up time.

In the case of vulnerable young people, those 400,000 in the social care system as well as those 1.49m pupils (16.5% of all pupils) with identified SEND, multiple agencies will be involved in their journey.

How can shared learnings be applied across agencies? Several expert opinions will be applied to each journey, so sharing this information across agencies will help in forming a stronger, better informed opinion of each child.

Conclusion

With inflation sky rocketing, energy bills soaring and wages failing to keep pace, there will obviously be a challenging time for many people. The links between poverty and SEND are clear, though.

So too, are the links between disadvantage and activities such as County Lines drug gangs. In desperate times, the apparent carrot of an easy way out will leave countless more young people vulnerable to these types of activity. It is estimated that as many as 50,000 young people are involved in County Lines activities across the UK. The temptation to make ‘easy money’ with such gangs will only grow with the cost of living crisis.

This is another situation where data and insight will be so important. There are various estimates as to the number of children missing education depending upon your definition of missing education, but those not accessing full time education is around the 50,000 mark. This might be coincidence, but such insight is valuable in protecting and safeguarding vulnerable young people.

As such threats increase in society, services being aware of them is a significant first step in attempting to resolve them.

The number of children in poverty will certainly increase. With that, crime will rise. Pressure on education, youth justice and social workers will increase, too. The link between poverty and SEND is apparent, creating another burden on already stretched resources.

Making the best use of the resources available is paramount. It has always been important, but never more so than now.

For more information on how technology can support local authorities, schools, parents, professionals and youth justice teams in improving outcomes for vulnerable young people, please visit our website here.

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

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

A technology partnership

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

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

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

Interoperability

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

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

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

FUSION

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

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

Ongoing assistance scheme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lucy Sweatman, Education Programme Manager for Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council said:

“We’re looking forward to working with IMPULSE Nexus. Most importantly, the new system means we can increase the quality of the service we offer to children and families, enabling both authorities to improve their SEND processes, with input from all agencies into each child’s plans and provision. It will also make the whole process more efficient, bringing everything to do with SEND into a single view. This means we will be able to help children and young people with SEND in a more collaborative way, driving and enhancing the partnership working between schools, professionals, authorities and parents. This will make the process of recording outcomes and requirements much more straightforward, enabling us to act more swiftly and efficiently.” 

IMPULSE Nexus is made up of several modules, of which local authorities can use as many as they need to support their education services. Based upon an interoperable framework, IMPULSE Nexus modules can integrate with other services and providers to offer a joined-up view of each child and service. 

“We’re delighted that Cambridgeshire County Council and Peterborough City Council have both chosen IMPULSE Nexus SEND solutions to support their ongoing work in this vital area,” says Phil Lucy, Director of CACI’s Children and Young Person’s division. “By providing a fully auditable trail of activities, with the ability for all stakeholders to record information, IMPULSE Nexus will help both authorities to enhance their SEND processes and provide efficient and effective support to those children needing their services.” 

“We’re looking forward to getting started with ChildView and realising the benefits that it will bring for our service and the young people who we support,” says Simon Newling-Ward, service manager at Nottingham City Council Youth Justice Service. “We need a system that will support every aspect of our work. ChildView ticks this box and further enables us to share data seamlessly and fully with other youth justice teams. With young people often moving around, it is vital that we can receive accurate and complete data on them when they come under our auspices. At the same time, it’s equally important for us to be able to share the information that we have built on a young person’s journey if they move to another local authority, in order that they can continue to receive the best support possible.” 

“We are delighted that Nottingham City Council has chosen to utilise ChildView across its youth justice service,” says Phil Lucy, director, CACI’s Children and Young Persons’ team. “Working with a majority of youth justice services operating in England and Wales and their major cities, I feel that our team can support Nottingham City Council’s team and we’re excited to do just that.” 

The contract was awarded to CACI via the G Cloud framework. 

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

Security

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

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

Cost efficiency

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

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

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

Flexibility

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

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

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

Peace of mind

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

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

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

Compliance

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

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

Training

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

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

Going green

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

Updates

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prison officers

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prison inmates

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

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

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

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

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

Key ways to improve scheduling ofprison officers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In many cases, the story behind young people in the youth justice sector gets lost in myriad systems and professional bodies. Information gets siloed, making it incredibly challenging for Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) to paint a clear and complete picture of each young person that comes to their attention. Without all the requisite information being readily available, and with several cases to work on simultaneously, how can YOTs be reasonably expected to discover and consider all the underlying issues?

Bringing all of the available information on each young person into one central source of truth is helping YOTs to navigate each young person’s story, using valuable insight gained across their cases to make informed decisions and interventions for each young person.

Using technology to improve outcomes in youth justice

Advancements in technology are really supporting YOTs in improving outcomes for young people in the youth justice sector. Aspects such as data mapping are enabling a new understanding of youth offending patterns, making it easier for YOTs to spot intervention points and improve their outcomes.

ChildView, CACI’s specialist youth justice management information and reporting system, is designed with this goal in mind. By providing a rich and accurate view of what is going on in the system, ChildView supports YOTs with all the latest multi-agency information and activity in one place.

By bringing together previously disparate teams and professionals, ChildView makes is easier to read and understand each young person’s journey.

Telling the youth justice story

Using a central database enables each young person’s story to be told and understood. “For me, what I like about ChildView is that it tells a story about the young person when they come to us,” says Sue Pattison, service and case support worker at South Tees Youth Offending Service. “For example, it informs us if they were released under investigation and what was attached to that offence. It enables us to record their story and its outcomes as a process and it just flows, making it easier to read and understand, meaning that we can make better informed decisions.”

Bringing together different agencies is a crucial step in telling each story. “We have moved two members of staff into each area team to support our prevention work, and they are to be supported by wider YOS resources,” explains Paul Harrison, partnerships manager at South Tees Youth Offending Service. “We have used ChildView for this as we want to keep every bit of information about the young person in one place. This means that we can review why that young person has required early help and what the outcomes of it were.”

Report and develop

Once a young person’s story has been understood and acted upon, it is vital to gather information on the outcomes in order to help identify similar issues in other young people’s stories and to understand how well each action and intervention has worked. Again, by recording all reports in a central system, YOTs can easily identify and review cases, using them to inform future decision-making processes.

“The reporting module in ChildView has enabled us to swiftly report on all aspects of our service, particularly the area of re-offending, which has allowed us to identify and characterise different groups of young people that we work with,” says Troy Hutchinson, performance systems and information manager at Luton Youth Offending Service. “As a performance manager I am able to develop localised reports that empower members of staff, whether they are case managers or practice managers, to complete their own specific reporting tasks and use the tools to support practice development.”

ChildView is supporting YOTs across the UK to gain a complete picture of each young person that comes into their services, enabling them to understand each story and focus on the outcomes.

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

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

Disadvantaging the disadvantaged

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

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

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

How can education help?

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

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

Walk in their shoes – Lara’s story

Joining the dots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solihull Council has chosen CACI’s ChildView youth justice software to underpin its youth justice work in the area. As part of the move to enhance engagement with young people and improve their outcomes, Solihull Council has sought to strategically evolve its services. Partnering with CACI will help Solihull Council in engaging with young people, recording their journeys and data mapping their outcomes for the benefit of all young people in their services.

ChildView will support Solihull’s youth justice practitioners by providing a holistic view of the council’s services. This will help Solihull’s youth justice team to efficiently and effectively deliver its vital frontline services, gaining deeper insight and understanding of the journeys it seeks to improve.

“Following a detailed consideration of the requirements for our Youth Offending Service, our engagement with young people and extensive market research, Solihull Council is pleased to announce CACI as our new Youth Justice partner,” says Zubair Afzal, consultant programme manager ant Solihull Council. “We look forward to delivering an improved Youth Justice offer in collaboration with CACI.”

“We’re delighted that Solihull Council has chosen our ChildView youth justice software to underpin its vital service delivery,” says Phil Lucy, director of CACI’s Children & Young Person’s division. “It’s an exciting opportunity for us to expand upon our service delivery in the West Midlands and support Solihull Council in evolving and enhancing its service delivery to vulnerable young people.”

Birmingham City Council has more than 400 schools in its area and made the decision in August 2019 to deploy IMPULSE Nexus from CACI to support its school admissions process. To date, Birmingham City Council has used IMPULSE Nexus to administer school admissions across all its schools, helping it to maintain a fair and transparent process that handles this delicate process with care, accuracy and flexibility.

IMPULSE Nexus has also supported the schools across Birmingham City Council with in-year admissions, allocating spaces to children who need to move between schools during the school year. “The system is a major step forward,” said one school portal user during a recent Birmingham City Council IMPULSE Nexus user group meeting. “We need the data to be correct at both ends due to the transiency of some pupils and IMPULSE Nexus has ensured that we always have instant access to accurate data.”

“We can get distances to schools instantly”

An important factor in determining school allocations is a child’s domestic location and how far they are from the school being applied to. IMPULSE Nexus automates this part of the process for the school admissions process, making it easier for administrators to make swift decisions based upon this metric. “It’s a lot quicker to get people on the waiting list and we can get distances to schools instantly, which is really useful for our admissions processes,” commented another school admissions administrator.

“Having the distances so quickly and easily is great – we know immediately who the closest person to a school is,” added another.

The school portal within IMPULSE Nexus acts as a central record from which all information on a child and school can be viewed. This means that administrators can easily access relevant information, such as distances and the local school rankings. “The school portal is a major step forward for us, it’s great to be able to see data in real time in there,” says one user of IMPULSE Nexus within Birmingham City Council’s network of schools. “It makes it really straightforward to manage the process and it’s easy to see where your students are.”

Communication made simple

IMPULSE Nexus has also made communication easier between the schools, admissions teams and Birmingham City Council professionals. Not only can communication be automated via the use of templates within the system, the need for email communications has been reduced as administrators and admissions teams can find the information they need themselves within IMPULSE Nexus. “Having distances available automatically is great, as is the ability to download rankings spreadsheets instantly,” says another. “I like the speed of everything, I’m contacting the admissions teams more infrequently which cuts out unnecessary emails and calls. The school, overall, is emailing the local authority a lot less now, as the data is available in real time and the speed of access is really good.”

Another benefit unlocked within Birmingham City Council has been the ability to rank schools in the area, with IMPULSE Nexus linking directly to the schools ranking system. “It’s a really useful piece of functionality,” said one administrator. “IMPULSE Nexus links directly to the ranking system, which makes allocating places easier. We can import and export relevant data automatically, too, which saves a lot of time in requesting and sending information.”

Overall, IMPULE Nexus is helping the schools, administrators and professionals across Birmingham City Council to more efficiently, accurately and easily manage the schools admission process for the children in the area.

Automation

Moving away from a manual process makes the whole school admissions process far smoother. Without the need to rely on data input and sifting through spreadsheets for information, decisions can be made much quicker, more accurately and more independently. Resolution of appeals is made simple with a reliable data trail of decisions and why they were reached. In year admissions can be handled swiftly by easily identifying which schools have places available and adding children to waiting lists can be done instantly.

By further linking your admissions process to aspects such as school rankings, distances travelled and each child’s personal journey, swifter, fairer and more transparent decisions can be reached. “The reduction in the manual process has been great,” concluded one administrator. “Having so much in-depth information available to us, with the ability to share data instantly, makes the whole process so much easier.”

In September, the Additional Learning Needs (ALN) code went live across Wales. The ALN code replaces the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) framework that will continue to function across England. The change is being made in order to bring support networks and resources together and improve outcomes for children and young people with identified additional learning needs.

Obviously, one of the major changes is in the wording. Special educational needs replace additional learning needs; therefore, SENCOs will become ALNCOs. The changes, however, are more than just linguistic and will involve significant changes in thinking about process and practice.

At present, any child or young person recognised as having SEN is given an individual education plan (IEP). These are being phased out in Wales, to be replaced by an individual development plan (IDP). IEPs stop when a young person finishes school; IDPs will carry on if the young person attends higher or further education, covering their entire education journey from 0-25.

ALN will further cover children and young people who have learning difficulties and disabilities (LDD), bringing LDD and SEN together in a single code.

Highlights

• Covers each young person with ALN from 0-25
• Merges SEN and LDD
• IDPs to replace IEPs

About the IDP

IDPs are structured to include minimum standards that must be adhered to by every school and local authority:

• A record of the child’s identified, developing and changing needs
• Required additional provisions for each child
• A timely, current action plan and agreed outcomes for each child
• How each element of progress is and will be measured
• Information that enables accountability which is legally enforceable
• Review dates to measure actions, tasks and outcomes

Ensuring that IDPs work efficiently and effectively will require services to collaborate to ensure that children recognised with ALN receive the support that they need to achieve the stated goals. This co-ordination between schools, colleges, other providers and local authority services will require a greater degree of flexibility in receiving and transferring holistic case records and data seamlessly.

It will also require more robust data capture, entry and checking to ensure that all contributions have been considered and the information is current, accurate and relevant within a child’s IDP. This is vital given that the IDP is an accountable and legally enforceable document. In sharing and collaborating on such important documents, their security and management is also paramount, containing as they will vast quantities of sensitive personal data.

Children, parents, outcomes

The collaboration goes beyond just working with other authorities and schools as the child or young people move schools or move location. There also needs to be full engagement with, and the provision of, information and appropriate advice to the families and young people. Again, the information needs to be shared seamlessly in a secure and timely fashion to enable families, children and young people to input into their journey and opportunities as appropriate.

The success of the ALN code will depend on this sharing of specific information about meeting needs, so it’s important for schools, colleges, other providers and authorities to consider new ways in how they will address the challenges and include the views of young people, parents and carers in the process, and the necessary adaptations to their service.

The role of technology

With all the relevant information stored electronically, amending, updating, transferring and receiving case records and IDPs will be performed using synchronised common structured data via a central hub system. The easiest way to open the entire process to the multi professional eco system in a secure fashion is via dedicated portals; one each for parents/carers, schools/colleges, local authorities and professionals. This enables everyone who needs to contribute to the process to have self-service tailored access and visibility so they can more easily make their contributions.

Maintaining a single, uniquely structured ALN case record enables schools, colleges and authorities to use the holistic view of each child to establish effective support. They can operationally establish things like reminders so that they can review and assess each case in good time and strategically use the structured data to understand and better respond to patterns of unmet need in different groups.

Having a well-structured central record then plays into the accountable and legally enforceable element of the IDP, since a transparent record of all chronological activity within the IDP will be available on demand. Furthermore, where a child moves school or placement, or a young person goes to college or university, their IDP can be simply passed to prospective institutions at which they will be continuing their education. These institutions will have a full record of prospective students, enabling them to plan and facilitate offers for their joining in good time, increasing the opportunity and likelihood of meeting stated outcomes.

Security

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) necessitates robust handling of data such as IDPs and information surrounding young people. How does your school or authority store its data?

Working with a technology partner that can assist you with data hosting solutions is one option, since outsourcing hosting is one way of staying compliant with GDPR and means that you are storing data with a trusted partner. This means that you can store your data with the flexibility you need, on premise or in cloud, to give your teams real-time access to your data.

Aspects such as backups and downtime also need to be considered alongside security – if there’s a system outage, how long can you afford to be without your data and how much can you afford to lose? Scalable solutions offer greater flexibility in managing, storing and securing your data as well as working with a growing user population involved in the meeting of ALN support needs over many years.

Improving outcomes

Fundamentally, however, you need a technology solution and a technology partner that can empower your authority and the staff in schools, colleges and other providers in the education support eco system to achieve the fundamental objective of the ALN code – improving outcomes for children and young people with recognised ALN.

CACI’s IMPULSE Nexus software is being used by several Welsh councils to support this underlying objective, whilst also helping them to comply with data and security regulations by offering a fully managed hosting service. This helps to take the uncertainties out of data storage and management alongside providing an information management solution that facilitates the seamless recording, transfer and receiving of holistic case records and data with improved engagement and contribution from the people around the child.

IMPULSE Nexus fully supports the ALN code by operating a uniquely structured and synchronised common central hub case record and IDP with associated identification and support information. Further, the dedicated IMPUSE Nexus portals provide schools/colleges, parents/carers, professional and local authority staff a direct, relevant and focused online experience to collaborate on delivering the centralised IDP, with a fully auditable and transparent record of activity. This creates greater collaboration between professionals, providers and authorities, helping to realise the purpose of the ALN code in delivering better outcomes for children and young people.

If you would like any further information on how IMPULSE Nexus and how CACI’s dedicated team can support you with the implementation and future success of the ALN code in Wales, please visit Impulse.

The concept of child trauma is a fluid one. There are the obvious examples that we can think of, those that social services and professionals deal with on a day-to-basis. Then there are the more intangible experiences of trauma, such as long-term neglect, structural and institutional trauma. The responses to behaviour by the professionals involved, be they teachers, youth offending teams or care workers, play a crucial role in the outcomes of these children. How can we work with conflict and challenge to join often disparate parts of our responses to create a roadmap to improved outcomes for all children?

CACI recently hosted an event exploring this topic. We were joined by a panel of domain experts: Alex Chard, director at YCTS; Shaun Brown, programme director at The Difference; Sonia Blandford, CEO at Achievement for All and; Marius Frank, strategic lead for E-learning development and youth justice at Achievement for All. The event was hosted by our Children & Young Person’s strategic director, Marc Radley.

How can we relate to children who have suffered lifetime trauma who find it hard to recover and build resilience?

“Understanding the history of these children is the responsibility of everyone concerned with their story,” says Alex. “We have to understand every child in youth offending services. At the moment we tend to ‘snapshot’ risk and tend to the most recent events. We need to look back further. We also need to assume that all children in the criminal justice system have suffered trauma. Gaining an understanding of early childhood abuse, especially something as corrosive as neglect, is a vital step in establishing relationships with these young people and building up their resilience.”

In what way do our system responses help or hinder recovery?

This was identified as an area for improvement by our panel. “There are so many layers in the systems that we operate and we tend to focus on what we know and understand,” explains Sonia. “These need to be an overarching view of every child; instead we have simplified information in silos. System responses, therefore, are a hindrance and can even exacerbate the difficulties for the child. We need to find ways to share our knowledge across the board and in order to learn and improve, we need to eliminate unhelpful routes and make things simple. At the moment there are too many layers.”

“Chronology and understanding of vulnerable children is hindered by misplaced fear of protecting privacy,” says Shaun. “Where access to past information is restricted, we can only see current information and there is no context. Understanding gets lost and many young people are left continually restarting their journeys.”

There is also the educational aspect in all of this, away from youth justice teams. “Assessment has failure built into it and this is a form of institutional trauma,” explains Sonia. “A lot of these children are always failing exams and tests and being told they’re bottom of the pile.”

“For some 14- and 15-year olds the first time they are diagnosed with severe educational disabilities is at screening by a youth offending team,” says Marius. “Why? Because of exclusions. This is driven by high stakes assessments and a results driven system.”

We are delighted to announce that CACI’s Cygnum workforce management software has been listed as an approved solution on the Health Systems Support Framework (HSSF). Operated by NHS England, the HSSF is a group of associated procurement frameworks to support delivery of integrated care, digitisation of the NHS and scaling of innovation by providing a marketplace of approved providers for NHS bodies to work with.

The addition of new workforce deployment service lines focus on eRostering, job planning and temporary staffing solutions. This will help the NHS become a truly modern employer by enabling evidence-based change and utilising best practice in workforce management, deployment and development of staff. The aim is that all workforce systems purchased and used by NHS organisations will meet national data and interoperability standards.

CACI’s Cygnum workforce management software is utilised by a number of public and third sector care organisations to help optimise and automate service delivery and support excellent patient care.

eRostering is core functionality in Cygnum, with the software allowing resources to be intelligently mapped to demand. Demand can be driven by patient needs, be this task-based from a patient care plan, or based on physical occupancy such as wards and rooms.

Cygnum ensures job plans are in place by recording assessments, training and competencies effectively and considering these against patient pathway demand and organisational needs.

Cygnum also meets the requirements of temporary staffing, ensuring an efficient and controlled process from first application, recording of training and competency, to staff rostering and self-management.

For more information on Cygnum, please click here.

As part of CACI’s ongoing efforts to enhance our service delivery to our customers, we’re delighted to announce that we have achieved the ISO 20000 service management certification. Our team has worked incredibly hard to align our practices with those outlined by ITIL, and the awarding of this certification is reward for all that hard work.

The ISO 20000 certification sits alongside our ISO 9001, 14001 and 27001 certifications and demonstrates CACI’s commitment to delivering the best possible service and ongoing support to our customers. To achieve the ISO 20000 standard, we have streamlined our processes and procedures and improved the ways we manage customer service. For example, we now use dashboards to monitor customer reviews and track feedback and internal improvement against these.

I’m delighted that we have been awarded the ISO 20000 certification,” says Matt Cooper, Senior Vice President at CACI. “It provides a further layer of assurance to our customers and inspires increased confidence in our solutions. Furthermore, it highlights the robust data security controls that we have in place, demonstrating the quality of, and ongoing commitment to, our products and services and best practices that we apply as a company.

CACI is delighted to confirm that it has been approved as a member of the RSSB (Rail Safety and Standards Board) as it seeks to strengthen its position as a 360-degree provider of products and services to the UK’s rail industry.

RSSB’s vision of a better, safer railway for everyone is shared by CACI. Via its multitude of products and services, CACI is strongly positioned to support the entire UK rail network in delivering this vision.

CACI provides products and services across the whole rail network to help deliver improvements in infrastructure management, optimise operational resilience and enhance the overall customer experience. Our portfolio of services includes understanding passenger numbers and putting in place solutions to facilitate passengers’ safe return to rail post-Covid, to understanding and driving efficiencies across the workforce employed to operate and maintain the network. CACI also supports operators through specialist consultancy, bespoke systems development and solution migration to aid operational efficiency.

We’re delighted to welcome CACI aboard as a member of RSSB.” says Chris Leech, Membership Development Manager UK + International at RSSB. “CACI’s products and services have lots to offer our vision of a better, safer railway in the UK and we’re excited to see what difference it can make to our industry. Efficiency, safety protocols and operational insight of services have been under the spotlight in recent years, so we welcome any technology provider that can help underpin improvements in our industry.

We’re delighted to have been approved a member of RSSB,” says Matt Cooper, senior vice president at CACI. “We firmly believe that our range of products and services are a great fit for the UK’s rail network. The rail industry, like everyone else, has been impacted by Covid, so there has never been a greater need to understand customer demand for rail services. Operational insight is vital, both to understand passenger journeys and to understand the challenges faced by those working on our rail network. By driving operational insight, we firmly believe that we can support the rail industry in delivering a better, safer railway for everyone.

Birmingham City Council has trained its 150th school as part of a city-wide school admissions digital transformation. The council is introducing a real-time online admissions portal, powered by the IMPULSE platform from CACI, and plans to have every school within the authority ready to use the system by the end of the year.

The new admissions portal was designed in collaboration with over 20 local schools and promises significant efficiency, quality and safeguarding benefits. It provides a shared, end-to-end dashboard for all parties – schools, council, parents, agencies – involved in the admissions process.

Information is updated in real-time and instantly accessible by all. Integrated and streamlined workflows allow decision-making processes which used to take weeks to be completed in minutes, allowing authorities to allocate staff and resources more efficiently.

The previous system saw all applications, rankings and correspondence managed manually, with the council using several disconnected offline spreadsheets to store information. Labour-intensive, slow, prone to human error, and rarely up to date, the process was very inefficient.

Sue Houghton, School IT/Data And Fair Access Manager, Birmingham City Council explains:

After engaging with several internal stakeholders, technical experts and management, Sue Houghton and her team secured funding from the council cabinet to work with CACI to create a bespoke, end-to-end, admissions process. The council also invited periodic feedback and testing from 20 different schools in the city as the system was designed and developed.

After taking delivery of the portal from CACI in late summer 2019, the council began a comprehensive training program for its 400 schools. The portal provides shared access to real-time admissions information, records and child status, visible to all parties and stakeholders.

Terry Lovegrove, Implementation Consultant, CACI explains:

The IMPULSE-based portal also helps school and council admissions teams better manage their workflow, by processing applications and referrals on an ongoing basis, rather than in batches. The automated system has been used to process over 14,000 primary and 16,000 secondary applications in the first six months of use.

Sue Houghton continues:

For the latest information on IMPULSE, please click here.

CACI is delighted to announce that Gwynedd and Anglesey Youth Justice Service has chosen ChildView as its information management system for youth justice services and for continuing to strategically enhance and evolve its vital services to vulnerable young people.

With Gwynedd and Anglesey deploying ChildView to operate and evaluate its services, it means that ChildView is now the regional specialist information management system of choice across Wales.

For the latest information on ChildView, please click here.

CACI is delighted to announce that Staffordshire Youth Offending Service (YOS) has chosen CACI’s ChildView youth justice information system to support, underpin and develop its important work with young people within its area.

ChildView will enable Staffordshire YOS to be fully compliant with YJB YJAF and statutory requirements ongoing as standard, whilst also being able to evaluate and enhance service impact. This will help improve journeys and outcomes for young people, through working more strategically as a team, implementing more efficient and effective processes and practices facilitated by information sharing and evidence-based learning.

Staffordshire has a team of approximately 80 staff in its youth offending service who will use ChildView to support vital specialist youth justice work and service delivery.

For the latest information on ChildView, please click here.

CACI is delighted to announce that Durham County Council (DCC) has selected ChildView as its information management system to underpin its youth justice services in the area. ChildView will enable Durham to strategically enhance and evolve its service delivery to vulnerable young people.

We selected ChildView as our new case management system, following a thorough tender process,” says Keith Forster, Strategic Manager at DCC. “We were impressed with the level of practice experience demonstrated by the team at CACI as well as the functionality of the system and breadth of built in reports available. The Team are excited to see the benefits that ChildView can bring to the Durham Youth Justice Service and how it helps to continue to improve outcomes for our young people.

We are delighted that Durham County Council has chosen ChildView as its youth justice information management system,” says Phil Lucy, Director of CACI’s Children and Young Persons division. “It’s testimony to the service that we provide to our customers, via our team of experienced practitioners and comprehensive youth justice software, that Durham County Council has chosen ChildView to support the ongoing practice and development of its services to vulnerable young people in the area.