Data is critical to the planning and delivery of early help for vulnerable children and families. Mark Raeburn, managing director of Capita One, looks at the essential role of the local authority data crunchers and explores how they get knowledge from information.

To get the right support in place that will prevent a family at risk from becoming a family in crisis, the first step is to know who needs help and what help is required.

A wide range of information is often needed to understand the full extent of a family’s difficulties. This could include attendance and achievement records from a child’s school, a timeline of visits carried out by a social worker or details relating to the mental health of a relative in the household.

This wealth of information needs to be brought together in a way that provides insight – the bigger picture. Whether your authority has a data analyst, an information manager or a knowledge specialist, the work undertaken by those individuals in this role is crucial for ensuring the organisation benefits from what can be one of its most powerful resources.

Challenging assumptions

Staff who work with your authority’s data can provide the insight required to make informed decisions about what issues are affecting children and families and where in your community services are needed most.

Importantly, the tasks data managers routinely perform can help confirm a gut feeling, or identify a trend that might previously have gone unspotted. If, for instance, you are concerned about the level of attendance in the area’s schools, that may only be part of the story. By digging a little deeper into the plethora of information coming in from schools and other sources, with the right tools, the data manager will be able to reveal hotspots of poor attendance by geographical area or uncover a particular issue with boys missing school from Key Stage 4 and 5, for example.

Knowing this means that the action taken can be much more targeted to nip problems in the bud sooner. The introduction of a new breakfast club or an outreach programme to help parents understand the impact of attendance on school progress might be all that is needed to tackle the issues and get children into school more regularly.

What’s more, your data manager can provide the evidence you need to ascertain whether the steps the local authority has taken have successfully reduced levels of persistent absence and truancy. And if not, decisions can be made quickly to adapt the approach so that the problem is addressed effectively.

Behind the scenes

In the years ahead, technology will make it much easier for senior leaders in local authorities to have more direct access to the information they need to make good decisions for children and families. This will demand robust and accurate information to be made available to them, so those responsible for managing a local authority’s data and systems have an increasingly essential role to play in supporting this trend.

IT solutions need to be properly maintained and protocols followed so that that the most up-to-date information is available to decision makers and it can be shared efficiently and securely between teams.
If you are a children and families services director concerned about the achievement of looked-after children in your area, for example, the decisions you make need to be based on the latest attendance and exclusion information on this group from schools.

Details of the different agencies involved with a particular family, such as the police or social services, might also be valuable. And being able to quickly see which schools are particularly effective at boosting the attainment of children with SEND will help you ensure best practice is shared across the authority.

Knowledge from data

here are many ways that the data manager can unlock the potential of a local authority’s data to give senior leaders and staff across children’s services the added dimension they need to take the right course of action, quickly.

While regarded by some as simply necessary for producing accurate government returns, the tasks undertaken by the data manager are mission critical to ensuring local authorities have a complete picture of a child at risk, and are better able to help families turn their lives around.