Portsmouth City Council has made transformational changes to the way they have used their data and moved to more collaborative partner working in their Children’s Services over the last 18 months.
Portsmouth’s Data Platform went live in March 2022, with the integration of data from over 40 different systems and partner agencies to create a complete view of their children’s lives and immediate families. This was the enabler to begin to use data more proactively and share more confidently.
The first service innovation added onto the Data Platform was their Vulnerable Pupil Tracking Portal (VPT). This is a secure online portal, shared with schools. It provides each school with their own data feeds and dashboards, which enables early identification of children who may have additional vulnerabilities. This allows effective plans of support to be implemented more quickly. Children who are then highlighted as being vulnerable are discussed on a fortnightly basis with their LA Education Link Coordinator to ensure effective oversight. The portal allows schools and local authority users to see all information relating to a child in one place, which saves users time from having to look at various databases. The child’s golden record includes data on attendance, exclusions, safeguarding teams, youth justice service, exploitation levels, SEN needs and other vulnerability factors. Schools report that this is an amazing resource for them, helping them in their daily work and to keep on top of safeguarding for children. This VPT also now holds Early Help support plans for the child and family, through online data collection and collaboration of support information against a centralised Family Support Plan. Overview reports and dashboards allows Service Managers and the Supporting Families Team to access the information to build this into their support work.
In summer 2023, the Data Platform was extended further, providing fully profiled views of families across the city for the Supporting Families Team, via their own Supporting Families (Phase 3) Portal. This Portal can automatically identify those families who are eligible for attachment as part of the Supporting Families National Programme (within the DLUHC National Outcomes Framework), as well as families who qualify for successful turnaround status.
Recently, a Neuro Diversity Profiling Portal has been added to the list of services. This provides an on-line first step in identifying neurodiversity in children and young people (aged 0-19) across the city, to help establish what additional support needs or learning difficulties a young person may have.
The Data Platform is also the basis for a Data Science proof-of-concept project, using Machine Learning models to look for early signs of a child becoming more vulnerable to becoming a Looked After Child in the future. The objective is to focus Early Help support activities as early as possible to prevent crisis, make families stronger / more resilient, and reduce the number of children being taken into care.
Portsmouth will also complete the implementation of a new MET / GANGS Portal, to give them more immediate understanding of children who are potentially Missing, Exploited or Trafficked, or who are linked to a gang or gang culture.
Hayden Ginns, AD for Children's Services for PCC and Portsmouth Place (NHS) says: ‘The new technology has enabled professionals in the city to appropriately (and legally) share vital information about children across agency boundaries. Local and national reviews into the safeguarding of children when things go awry nearly always point to a lack of appropriate sharing of information - both in terms of the right information and sharing early enough to prevent harm. This is often a practice issue. But technology can be a major factor in improving how services work together for the benefit of children and families. For example, we learnt early on that schools do not always know who a child's social worker is. Just that simple exchange of information can make a major difference to the quality of safeguarding children.’
If you are interested in learning more about anything contained in this article, please contact fran.shaul@portsmouth.gov.uk