Systems integration, social care

Children’s services systems: a move from complexity to simplicity

Robert Fitzgerald

It is these recent events that have given rise to a wealth of initiatives aimed at encouraging organisations involved in providing services to children, from hospitals and schools, to police and voluntary groups to work together to share information and thus protect young people from harm. It is no surprise that these issues of safeguarding take precedence, however behind these issues is a complicated mosaic of services for the education and support of children.

Of course the holistic nature surrounding the work that agencies and support organisations within children’s services undertake means that they operate in a complex environment and must engage with a wide range of Government-led and locally defined initiatives. In particular, and increasingly over the past few years, there has been a growing commitment to information sharing between children’s services professionals across the key sectors of social care, education, youth offending, health, housing and so on. 

Ultimately effective information sharing improves service delivery and contributes towards better outcomes for children. Some children require support from more than one agency and hence it is important to provide a holistic approach to identifying needs and providing solutions. As such it is important to enable and encourage children’s services professionals to work effectively together to deliver frontline services.

Furthermore the government has invested greatly in improving information sharing and management for children’s services through its driving force; the Every Child Matters agenda. In fact never before has central Government led so directly from the front as it is doing so now. Its agenda and children’s plan deliberately aim to remodel the children’s workforce, the processes it uses, its governance structure and its relationship with families and children.

A key support for this agenda comes through the implementation of major IT programmes, and the government has already heavily invested in centralised databases for ContactPoint and the national eCAF. It is now time for local authorities to focus on what they can do at a grass roots level to improve their IT support structures to maximise delivery of vitally needed frontline services.

One child, one record, one outcome

There has clearly been considerable debate surrounding children’s services of late, and naturally this has encompassed the processes involved. In such a complex and sometimes emotionally charged environment where the processes that underpin the delivery of child care services are heavily regulated and time consuming to administer, technology is an essential ally in helping to create positive outcomes.

Good data in an information system is an essential ingredient of effective decision making. The government’s Improving Information Sharing and Management (IISaM) project targets information sharing, professional training and broadened responsibilities for all involved in children’s services. It binds together the key components of effective process, workforce reform and technology to highlight the key challenges in both systems design and children’s services of the future: compliance, efficiency and collaboration.

With an increased expectation for greater inter-agency co-operation between groups that share responsibility for the wellbeing of children, whether in terms of protection, support, healthcare or education, as well as programmes like ContactPoint, eCARE, eCAF and Connecting for Health, it is important to ensure that information shared is accurate and up-to-date. This makes the quality of the raw data held on the system ever more significant. Data cleansing is therefore of great importance.

Improving information and data management is not about merely having IT systems in place; it is about using them effectively and ensuring that they can communicate as easily with each other as the practitioners of the ground. Surprisingly, it is not uncommon for local authorities to have between 40 and 60 separate children’s databases in operation at one time.

Many will have been developed organically over the years with hardly a thought as to how they can interact with each other. Now, with increasing support costs and the need to ensure that these systems can support a ‘wrap-around’ service approach, local authorities are facing the need to rationalise systems in order to generate clear improvements and enhance efficiencies.

Whilst many of these local authority databases support statutory services or have key back-office functions (eg school admissions and transport) and have little need to communicate with each other, frontline case management systems have a clear record keeping role and play an important part in protecting children. Most, however, have little capability to pass information between them that would make it easier to view in one place social care, health, youth offending and education data.

Clearly there needs to be a balance because what should have been a major step forward for children’s services, sensibly using technology to give a rounded view of children at risk and to monitor the level of interaction and support being offered by various agencies, to monitor the level of interaction and support being offered by various agencies, is being hampered by a lack of basic integration.

According to the NSPCC one to two children per week die a violent death in England and Wales. Whilst no IT system can ever fully guarantee that children will not fall through the net of support provision, local authorities across the UK are of course committed to establish robust practices that reduce the chances of this happening.

As anyone who works in technology knows, a ‘let’s join it all up’ philosophy does not work unless executed with considerable forethought. The current state of the Integrated Children’s System (ICS) is a result of phased DCSF compliancy requirements which have left the country divided as to whether the electronic ICS actually helps or hinders local authorities in the protection of vulnerable children.

In his recent statement on the establishment of the Social Work Taskforce, Ed Balls said: “I know some people have raised concerns about how ICS works and I am determined to make sure social workers have the best system they can. Good record keeping is vital. But it is essential that social workers are able to do their jobs with the minimum of bureaucracy and they are able to achieve the right balance between maintaining their records and spending time with vulnerable families.”

Keeping good records is also significant for other areas of local government. Both frontline and back-office IT systems have an important role in capturing data needed for statutory and mandatory reporting within children’s services. In the last round of revisions to the National Indicator set it emerged that over a third of the 198 national indicators are to be derived from returns supplied by children’s services. Regarded as vital for future budget calculations, this requirement can add a considerable resource burden to local authority support teams and is a key factor in determining the ‘value’ of one database over another.

On what basis, then, can a local authority effect efficiency in its IT support, given an expected decrease in real-term spending as outlined in the recent Comprehensive Spending Review?

Future focused

Fundamental to the notion of integrated service delivery in children’s services is that it is supported by an IT system that reflects the ideas of close co-operation, pooled budgeting and information sharing. Put simply, an array of systems that cannot aspire to support this with cohesion will be deemed inefficient. Local authorities therefore, must go through a reappraisal process and assess the true value of each of its databases; either discarding them or rationalising them.

The eventual establishment of a ‘single’ IT system for children’s services in any given authority may well be possible in the near future, but there are numerous barriers to it. Commercial considerations, protection of current assets and the complexities of the mixed economy make it unlikely that a single database with multiple applications all supplied by one vendor who has all the necessary expertise is the answer.

More realistic is a direct initiative from local authorities to motivate suppliers to work together to produce a best-of-breed system that takes advantage of all the integration technologies that currently exist.

The potential of such a system is immense; it integrates multiple applications from health, social care, education, youth justice and youth support to serve the service delivery functions of the authority and appropriate information sharing. It facilitates easy access to its users via the use of mobile applications and other devices (eg PDAs) and connects with ContactPoint, eCAF and Connect for Health.

Furthermore it links to corporate systems for communications, document management, finance, housing, HR and planning and can encompass CRM capabilities and service user access. Cross-service reporting is also possible for the production of all returns (statutory and mandatory) from an associated data warehouse.

Whilst this may only be a future aspiration for some, a number of forward-looking local authorities are steadily moving towards it and an increasing number of tenders are clearly identifying a desire to rationalise current systems, replace less useful ones and focus on IT integration to mirror the co-operation expected of frontline staff.

Whether or not we agree with the DCSF’s technological stand point of promoting ContactPoint as a key to greater information sharing, its lead is a significant driver in energising both local authorities and suppliers to work together to provide the level of integrated IT support that can really benefit the aims of the Every Child Matters agenda.

Systems rationalisation is a crucial element in the transformation of a modern 21st century children’s services. Technology can significantly aid child protection, but of course it is not an end in itself, it must be integrated with a far wider range of elements. Simply making information available through technology will not solve the issues alone.

Robert Fitzgerald, children’s services project manager, OLM Group