With academy conversion continuing to rise Mark Raeburn, managing director at Capita One, explains why data from schools will continue to be a vital element in getting the right help for children and families in place sooner.

Everyone has their own strategy for attempting a jigsaw puzzle, but many people find the best place to start is to check you have all the pieces. Missing pieces make it difficult to see the crucial clues you need to complete the picture.

Likewise, to understand the full extent of a family’s difficulties, local authority staff need to gather various pieces of information from a wide range of sources and slot these together in a way that makes sense.

When it comes to identifying and supporting vulnerable children, information from schools is essential to uncovering the challenges going on in their lives. And with more schools becoming academies, many local authorities will turn their thoughts to how key data, such as details of children who are looked after or have been excluded, can continue to be captured in the future.

Constructing a picture

The vital jigsaw pieces needed to reveal a picture of vulnerability within a family could include notes from a GP outlining the mental health issues being experienced by a teen parent, details of a visit recorded by a social worker following a domestic incident in the home, or a police report of anti-social behaviour in the neighbourhood.

Information on a child’s attendance, achievement and behaviour from their school can help highlight links between what’s going on in the classroom and what is happening at home too.

If a child starts repeatedly missing school on a Monday morning, for example, or their behaviour in class suddenly begins to deteriorate, there could be many reasons behind it. But it could be that their family is struggling to make ends meet or they are experiencing neglect and abuse.

Changes in a child’s behaviour at school can be one of the earliest indicators that their family might be having difficulties. The sooner local authorities are aware of the issues affecting a vulnerable child in school, the quicker families will get the help they need to give their children the best chance in life.

Managing change

You could say that school data provides local authorities with the corner pieces to the jigsaw of vulnerability and helps them build the framework around which all other information fits.

That’s why many schools that have already converted to academy status have agreements in place that enable them to continue sharing data. Details of children’s attendance, achievement, behaviour and whether or not they are entitled to free school meals, for example, might be exchanged with the local authority on a weekly or sometimes even daily basis.

Technology is available that makes this a simple task too, allowing data stored on an academy’s management information system to be transferred electronically to the local authority and back again automatically. This ensures that timely information is available to all those who need it, with minimal impact on staff workloads.

With all the pieces of information in one place, a social worker that has flagged up a concern about a vulnerable family with housing or other difficulties, for example, could check how the children are doing in school. This will help them step in quickly to provide any support necessary to ensure their learning is not interrupted during what might be a turbulent time.

Supporting early help

The success of the early help agenda relies heavily on the effective sharing of data. In practice, this is all about local authorities being aware of issues sooner, so that decisions can be made quickly to improve lives.

When it comes to identifying children and families at risk, local authority staff often talk about the need to pull different pieces of information together in order to get a full view of their circumstances.

Whether it is the attendance or achievement data from a child’s school, notes from a medical practitioner relating to the deteriorating health of a family member or details from a social worker who has flagged a safeguarding issue, every piece of information tells a small part of the story on its own.

But when these different pieces of data are brought together, a more accurate picture of a child or family’s situation emerges. Data from schools has always been and will remain a vital piece in the puzzle of vulnerability. So, ensuring it can be shared simply is critical to enabling the right decisions to be made, at the right time, to prevent a family in need from becoming a family in crisis.