How Tower Hamlets and the City of London Youth Justice Service (TH+C YJS) uses Metabase with ChildView to enhance reporting

Reporting on the vulnerable children in the protection of youth justice services (YJSs) is vital in understanding their journeys. Context can be everything, helping YJSs to enact the right actions at the right time. Tower Hamlets and the City of London Youth Justice Service (TH+C YJS) has been using ChildView from CACI since 2014. In 2023 they made the decision to enhance their reporting function by taking advantage of ChildView’s integration with Metabase. 

This case study takes a closer look at why TH+C YJS chose to do this and the results and benefits it has yielded for them. 

How Tower Hamlets and the City of London YJS reported on its data before 

Prior to choosing Metabase, TH+C YJS was using the standard reporting suite within ChildView. “We chose Metabase because it opens up a direct connection to the information we record in ChildView for the day-to-day oversight of the children we support,” explains Will, Senior Data Analyst at TH+C YJS.  

Will, who had previously worked at Hackney YJS, was familiar with ChildView and Metabase already. “I’ve personally used Metabase since 2022 when I was in Hackney, but we’ve had it in TH+C YJS since 2023,” he explains. 

What benefits has Tower Hamlets and the City of London YJS realised? 

With a comprehensive reporting suite, TH+C has been able to interrogate its data in real-time whilst removing human error and manual processes. “We’ve built dashboards for almost every area of data monitoring and cleansing,” says Will. “We have a Team Management dashboard which replaced manually populated Excel forms – this completely removed the possibility for human error during manual population and enabled managers to see the performance of their staff at any time based on live data, not just ahead of monthly supervisions.” 

The Metabase integration with TH+C data has also made its internal processes more efficient. “Identifying the eligibility of children for group work intervention programmes, for the Turnaround programme, and for transfer for to Probation services was streamlined, with the staff leading on those areas now only needing to check these dashboards to see all eligible children, ensuring nobody slips through the cracks,” adds Will. 

“We’ve also built a number of other dashboards including granular details of our Out of Court cohort, reporting on the new YJB KPIs, detailed overviews of our referrals to partnership services, monitoring ethnic disproportionality, readiness for the HMIP inspection, monitoring reoffending without waiting for the official YJB figures and getting a handle on our Education, Training & Employment by highlighting the children whose ETE status indicates they are most in need of support.”  

With a more transparent overview of the data it holds, TH+C is in a stronger position to realise improved outcomes for the vulnerable young people in its YJS. 

The reports are used by around 40 users within Tower Hamlets, including all youth justice practitioners and managers, restorative justice and victims worker, business support officers and eight members of partner agencies. “Oversight of permissions through user groups is simple and ensures that no members of staff have access to any data that they shouldn’t,” says Will. “For example, victim reports and dashboards with personally identifiable information are only visible to those whose roles absolutely require it.” 

How easy is it for Tower Hamlets and the City of London YJS to create new reports and insights? 

“The visual Metabase query builder is easy to use for anyone with a basic understanding of the data stored in ChildView, such as previous experience with the ChildView Report Builder,” explains Will. “CACI provided guidance on which data fields are stored in which tables, and which work as ‘foreign keys’ to join separate tables together.” 

“The Metabase website also has extensive guidance on its additional features, such as creating Custom Columns in the query editor which apply filtering and customisation to data without the need to add more data tables into ChildView. Adding filters to dashboards further increases the utility of Metabase reports, meaning staff can select their own name from a dropdown menu, and the reports displayed will then filter to only show data for children relevant to them.” 

Conclusion 

By creating agile, transparent reports, TH+C has been able to realise efficiencies of effort, enhance effectiveness in dealing with vulnerable children and remove human error from its reporting processes. Being able to rely on its own data fully, without waiting for external validation on facts and figures, supports its frontline staff in doing what they do best – improving outcomes for the children in their services.  

With a transparent dataset available to the right people, TH+C can also better manage and understand its work, responding more swiftly to children and their situations as they arise, providing support where it’s most needed. 

If you’re already using ChildView and would like to know more about taking advantage of the integration with Metabase, please contact your account manager for more information. If you need more information on ChildView and how it can support youth justice teams and their vital work, please visit www.caci.co.uk/childview.