North Yorkshire Council are pursuing an innovative pilot project exploring how a new technology solution could help to improve children’s services case management to support social workers to keep children safe. The project is being funded by the Department for Education’s Children’s Social Care Digital and Data Solutions Fund and supported by the CII and partners at Microsoft.
Local authorities have to navigate a mass of data and information as they seek to ensure the children in their care are able to receive the best possible support. This can be complex and time-consuming, taking social workers away from vital time spent with children and families. North Yorkshire’s case management solution seeks to address these challenges.
Using analytics tools, the system will be able to efficiently search and analyse data and information across different sources and systems so that children’s services providers have immediate and easy access to the key information about a child or family at the click of a button. The semantic search function can importantly operate across both structured data sources and unstructured data, for example written case notes or written assessments, and extract the key elements for the user.
The team at North Yorkshire have also been keen to target the tool towards creating comprehensive genograms and ecomaps, which will provide a map of the important people and places in a child’s life, and help identify those who can help to keep a child safe and those who may pose a risk. This will assist social workers to take better, more proactive decisions to protect local children, and also help to keep children connected to their local, community networks. This could have a transformative impact for children going into the care system, for example, by making social workers aware of a neighbour or a family friend who the child knows and trusts and who could provide care to the child for a period of time.
In addition, North Yorkshire is looking at how it can utilise existing smart technology to create fit-for-purpose systems designed for the social workers of today and the future, for examples exploring the potential for voice notes to become a key part of how practitioners record information about a child.
In order to create a tool that works for children, families and practitioners, the Council has conducted extensive user research work to inform development, including garnering an understanding of difficulties with existing case management systems, the key features local authorities would welcome in a case management system and exploring potential use cases for the tool both within and beyond children’s social care. The team have also shared key learning from the project along the way, especially to support other teams to negotiate complexities around data and information sharing.
The team are aiming for a prototype tool to be available in early 2024, which will be piloted with service users and tweaked according to feedback. The aim is for a revised product to be produced by spring 2024, alongside a guidance framework, evaluation and recommendations paper.
The potential of this tool is vast, with opportunities identified including supporting those children and young people at transition points in the sector, enabling a comprehensive single view of the child and helping services to better understand trends and patterns and translate these into service improvements.
Pioneered in North Yorkshire, the intention is for the project to contribute to wider policy improvements and for the tool to become something that can be readily adopted by other local authorities and services to scale the transformative impact for children, young people and families.
You can watch the CII webinar series with North Yorkshire council following the development of this exciting project here:
https://coram-i.org.uk/coram-innovation-incubator/coram-innovation-incubator-webinars/