Ekta Mehta, Author at CACI

How to make cyber security simple in your care service

Posted on: 25 June 2025

Running a home care service is complicated enough without throwing the modern concern of cyber security into the mix. This blog will take a closer look at how you can easily, efficiently and effectively manage cyber security in your care service. It doesn’t need to be as complicated, expensive and time consuming as you might assume.

Care services process vast amounts of personal and sensitive data, bringing them under the scope of regulations such as GDPR. Managing cyber security can be a daunting prospect. With a language seemingly all of its own, from phishing and malware to multi-factor authentication and encryption, it can be tricky to navigate for those without a technological background. We will explore how cyber security can be easily managed by care providers. We’ll break down the various considerations and look at simple, effective means of managing it.

What is cyber security and how does it affect care providers?

To begin with, a quick explainer on what cyber security is. Cyber security is the function of protecting the devices we use, such as computers and smartphones, and the services we access via them, from theft and malicious intent.

For example, if you or one of your care workers loses or has their smartphone stolen, you need to have measures in place to prevent access to sensitive information on the device. This covers everything from banking apps to your care plans. We’ll look at how this can be easily achieved.

Why is cyber security important for care providers?

Care providers process and record a lot of sensitive, personal information on the clients in their care. It is essential that this data is protected from theft, misuse or breach. Everything from the names, addresses and care records of your clients – anything that makes them identifiable – is considered sensitive information.

Processing this information is essential to the smooth running of your services. You need to be able to inform your care workers of the care they need to provide with each visit. You will also need to be able to share such information with other care providers and the NHS where necessary.

Sharing information extends to the CQC, too. With in-person inspections from the regulator becoming more infrequent, you may be asked to submit evidence electronically for assessment, the result of which may or may not be an in-person inspection. Being able to handle and share the data securely is paramount. CACI’s Certa care management software supports this with a dedicated CQC reporting feature which is designed to help you record, sort and share data easily and securely.

What do care providers need to consider with regards to cyber security?

Confidentiality: all client information, from names and addresses to care plans and medications, must be protected in line with GDPR. Deploying a CMS such as Certa, with an app for your carers to access client data through, is critical for minimising risk and GDPR compliance.

Data minimisation: consider what data you need for services and remove that which you don’t.

Encryption: how are care workers and clients accessing the information that you hold? Securing devices with strong password and two-factor authentication helps to protect your data.

Access controls: ensure only appropriate people can access information on your clients, restricting access across your organisations with role-based permissions.

Staff training: making all your staff aware of cyber security threats is imperative, from phishing email attacks to securing their devices correctly.

System security: staying on top of installing software updates and security patches is essential.

Cyber security and your CQC inspections

It’s vital to grasp the significant regulatory expectations care services operate under. The Care Quality Commission’s Single Assessment Framework, for instance, scrutinises how data is kept safe and managed securely, particularly under the ‘Well-led’ Quality Statement concerning governance, management and sustainability. This isn’t a vague aspiration; there are clear expectations that robust arrangements for the availability, integrity and confidentiality of data, records and data management systems are in place.

Failing to meet these standards, which are intrinsically linked to the Data Protection Act 2018 (incorporating GDPR), isn’t just a procedural hiccup. It can directly impact your CQC assessment and rating.

The CQC explicitly expects providers to comply with the Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT) or an equivalent, considering it a minimum for a ‘good’ provider. Ignoring these responsibilities isn’t an option if you want to avoid potentially severe consequences, from hefty fines issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office to the kind of reputational damage that erodes the trust of those you care for and their families. In today’s digital-first world, overlooking robust data security is a direct risk to the sustainability of your service and, most critically, to the safety and privacy of the vulnerable people you support.

Making cyber security simple for care providers

Whilst cyber security is a vital consideration for every care service, there is an array of complicated terminologies that can bewilder anyone – especially when your focus is firmly set on delivering outstanding person-centred care to your clients.

If you’re managing a care service, there are enough plates to keep spinning without the added headache of data security. It can be tempting to ignore it and focus on what your service is designed to deliver. The good news is that securing your data is a lot simpler than you might think.

Choosing the right care management software can drastically reduce the burden of cyber security for you and your care service. Modern software is designed with cyber security in mind.

If you haven’t already, digitising your care service is a vital first step. If you’re reliant on paper records, whilst they might not be compromised via malicious emails and lost smartphones, what happens if your office is burgled or there’s a fire? Recovering that data is impossible.

Then there are those services using a hybrid system of paper records, Word and Excel documents. Where multiple systems are being used, even if they are digital, there are risks to your data in not maintaining sensitive data is one, secure location. Where records are being emailed around, there is further risk of interception and incorrect recipients which will compromise your data security.

How Certa can make cyber security easy for you

At CACI, we understand that protecting sensitive data isn’t just a technical requirement. It’s fundamental to delivering quality care. That’s why, as a care management software provider with more than 20 years sector experience, cyber security is at the very heart of what we do.

CACI’s approach is ‘secure by design,’ meaning robust protection is built into our software from the outset. CACI has all the relevant security certificates to support its work, including ISO20000, ISO27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus to support this.

To simplify that, it means that we’re experts in processing and securing data, something you can benefit from with our care management software solution, Certa.

At a time when everyone expects to interact with services digitally on demand, Certa is designed to achieve this. From storing client information to making it available to carers, clients and their loved ones, act with confidence that your data security is handled with Certa.

For more information and to book a demo, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/certa.

Caring for the carers: getting the most from your care workforce

Posted on: 17 June 2025

Recruiting care workers is becoming an increasingly difficult and costly operation. Job vacancies in the care industry are plentiful. This affords care workers a greater degree of choice and flexibility in choosing who they work for. So, why should they work for you and your home care service? From salary to working conditions, your service needs to be an attractive proposition to skilled care workers. You then need to have the processes and systems in place to keep them, otherwise the process repeats itself all over, costing you time and money, impacting on service delivery. In this blog we will examine how you can attract and retain care workers, helping to make your care service more effective and efficient.

Why is caring for the carers important to your care service?

It’s an obvious question to ask, but why is caring for your carers so important? If we look at your clients for a moment, continuity of care is vital. It builds rapport, trust and establishes a personal touch to your services. Your clients, at a vulnerable stage of their lives, will appreciate consistency and the presence of carers who they like and who understand their needs.

In a situation where you’re constantly shuffling your pack, bringing agency workers in to plug gaps and recruiting anyone to support service delivery, this vital sense of connection between your clients and your service is quickly lost.

One of the questions the CQC asks as part of its single assessment framework is, are your services caring? Where you have consistent, understanding carers who specialise in the area of care they are administering, it makes answering ‘yes’ to that question – and demonstrating it – much easier.

There’s also a financial element to consider for care services here. With lots of vacancies comes a lot of competition for care workers. If you can attract and retain staff, it minimises your need to recruit. This reduces staff costs and a reliance on more expensive agency staff in delivering your care services. If you look after your care workers, they will look after your clients, which in turn will look after your business. It’s a virtuous circle which reduces costs and administrative headaches.

How can you care for your carers?

We’ve established why it’s so important to care for your carers, but how can you achieve this? Your care service is likely a very busy environment, with a multitude of demands being juggled simultaneously. We’ll look at how you can effectively care for your carers, from their appointment through to, hopefully, a long and successful career with you.

Understand the skills of your carers

Each carer who works in your care services has a unique set of skills and experiences. How can you best deploy them across your clients? Each of your clients, too, has their own unique care needs, so effectively matching your carers to your clients is important.

Assign your carers to tasks they’re passionate about

A continuation of understanding the skills and experiences of your carers is scheduling them to tasks they’re passionate about. Not only will this help to keep your carers happy, it will have a knock-on effect in the care they deliver to your clients. It’s a logical thing to do, but something that can get lost in the maelstrom of administrative tasks faced by registered managers and administrators.

Help your carers develop their careers with you

Every care worker wants to advance their career. It helps them to stay motivated, increase their earning potential and realise their own potential as carers. Providing training opportunities is a great way to support your carers. It helps them to develop and also demonstrates that you’ve got their best interests in mind.

Communication

It sounds simple, but getting communication right between management and carers is crucial. Where you communicate clearly and well, it builds trust and rapport between you and your workforce. Having the means to effectively achieve this is an important consideration. Communication extends beyond on the day, last minute communications, to letting carers know their schedule in advance, equipping them with the relevant information they need for each visit and providing them with a means of recording visits and leaving feedback. This is another aspect to feature on the CQC’s single assessment framework.

Use the right care management software

Technology plays a fundamental role in the success of care services like yours. From onboarding new clients and care workers, to managing finances and care schedules, using care management software that supports your care services is essential. When choosing the best system for your care service it is important to involve your care workers in the decision making process. They will be the ones using it day in, day out, to deliver your services.

How Certa from CACI can help you care for your carers

Certa is a complete care management software solution designed for care providers. It supports every aspect of care delivery, including the scheduling, communication and understanding of your care workforce.

With bespoke dashboards for each office manager and administrator, you can more easily understand the skills and experiences of your carers, match them to tasks and clients that suit them and create continuity in your care services. You can also better identify areas for improvement, suggest training courses and receive feedback from your carers.

Certa can support you in caring for your carers. For more information, visit www.caci.co.uk/certa/.

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

Posted on: 15 April 2025

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.

Shaping a system for flood management with the Environment Agency

Posted on: 14 April 2025

The Environment Agency has chosen CACI’s Cygnum system to support its flood management response teams. With more than 7,000 staff members with incident roles, the Environment Agency has to balance long term incident response preparation with short term workforce scheduling in responding to incidents immediately. CACI are shaping Cygnum to meet these very specific requirements to underpin the Environment Agency’s response to floods.

To begin with, Cygnum is a long-established workforce management solution which is utilised by organisations such as Transport for London, the Care Quality Commission and Network Rail. It is deployed by organisations with large workforces to handle scheduling, training and competency management, either as a standalone solution or as part of a wider technology ecosystem.

Understanding the skills, experience and training of employees, assessing them, recording their results and ensuring the right people are in the right place at the right time is Cygnum’s remit.

What the Environment Agency needs for its flood management response

The Environment Agency needs a system to support its incident management responses. Such incidents vary from pollution to flooding, with its staff volunteering for two roles: duty roles, where they are on call 24/7 for one week in every eight and; incident activated where they are only called upon during active incidents. The Environment Agency works closely with other agencies such as the Met Office to help forecast flooding incidents. This helps to manage staffing numbers and understand where and when incidents are most likely to occur.

Staffing is only one facet of incident response at the Environment Agency, though. When responding to an incident such a flood, there is also the need for a lot of equipment. The severity of the incident must be decided upon and the response activated. In a live environment, this can also need to be scaled up or down. Being able to call upon specialist equipment and appropriate operators in real time is essential.

How Cygnum has been shaped to assist with flood management

Cygnum has long supported organisations in workforce management. This covers scheduling, competency management and training, with all three being interlinked. You need to schedule staff, you need to know that they’re appropriately skilled, qualified and experienced (competent) for the tasks they’re being scheduled to and you need to assess their performance, provide ongoing training where necessary and upskill staff from within. That’s a very high level overview of workforce management.

The unique challenge with the Environment Agency for Cygnum is in overlaying the scheduling of equipment onto tasks. Similarly to scheduling people, you need to know that equipment is fit for purpose.

In an incident response scenario, the equipment is unlikely to be in the same location as the people. What equipment is needed to respond to an incident? Who has the skills to operate the equipment? Where is the equipment and where are the staff who can operate it? Is it in use anywhere else? Then there are other factors such as repairs and servicing. Having an accurate and complete overview of equipment, similarly to staff, is essential in effective incident response.

Bringing schedules and availability together

Environmental incidents require urgent action, so it’s vital to be able to bring together the schedules and experiences of staff with the availability and suitability of equipment. Quickly.

In creating an incident management response framework, Cygnum has to overlay these two areas. This provides transparency and, crucially, accurate real-time information on the availability of staff and tools.

This facilitates decision making appropriate to the level and nature of an incident. Rather than manually searching records and locating items piecemeal, informed decisions can be made from a central screen. From this, actions can be determined and mapped out.

This helps to reduce human error, since rules can be established to prevent an action from being implemented in the event that either the staff member or piece of equipment is unsuitable for the task.

For example, if someone is on site somewhere else or a piece of equipment has been damaged in its last usage, neither are appropriate for the task at hand. Having immediate oversight of this prevents assumptions and errors.

Building your system around you

Every organisation has different, bespoke requirements when it comes to managing their workforce and responding to incidents that impact upon service delivery. In delivering Cygnum, we are always working in close partnership with organisations to ensure that their individual needs are met.

This means no two implementations are the same, but allows us to work with a wide array of organisations where complexity, scale and mission criticality are key. Adding incident management capability to Cygnum’s scope offers even more value to these customers.

For more information on Cygnum, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Achieving outstanding CQC inspection results in your care service

Posted on: 13 March 2025

If you’re facing tightening budgets and an increased demand for efficiency, understanding the specifics of how your care service runs is essential. If you’re facing the scrutiny of a CQC inspection, understanding and being able to portray how your care service runs is also essential. Modern systems play a fundamental role in supporting care services to achieve these aims. From acting as a central database to helping software users collate and interrogate the data they need, having the right care management software in place can make reporting and your CQC inspection that much easier.

Displaying accurate data depends upon accurate data capture. By giving prominence to data within your care service, you can help to ensure its smooth transition from the point of recording through to displaying it in reporting dashboards across your organisation.

Your data, displayed your way

Being able to easily access, examine and report on the data produced across your services is important in understanding care delivery, what’s working and what can be improved. This covers point of care delivery through to financial management.

It is, therefore, important to provide each user with easy access to the data they need. Your care management software provider should be able to help you here. Certa, for example, is provided with a suite of out of the box reporting and dashboards. These cover the areas of your operation that you need, with the ability for you to self-serve and create your own reports and dashboards. Of course, our team is on hand to assist you when you need.

If that sounds daunting, system training is readily available to those who need it and is covered at the point of implementation.

This gives you the freedom to interrogate your data your way, not just work with a one size fits all solution.

Understand your care services

With robust and bespoke reporting mechanisms in place, you can truly get under the bonnet of your care services. What is working well? What could be improved? Where can efficiencies be found?

Only with the right software supporting you can you answer those questions.

Okay, so what do I need to be looking at?

To get you started, Certa provides the following reporting tools upon implementation, although you can set up bespoke reports or fall back on our team to help you:

Operational management: Future staff usage, unplanned visit analysis, missed visits, real-time care worker analysis, my tasks (what the user has to complete) and staff compliance (e.g. key accreditations and where they might be expiring).
Client management: A full overview of each client’s timeline, covering previous and planned visits, actions taken and billing.
Financial management: Full timesheet reporting with an audit trail of authorisations for timely and accurate billing and pay.
System administration: A complete audit of system users and admin trails.
Senior management: Profitability reporting and business insights.
Client portal: Planned and delivered care with the ability for clients, their friends and family and to see what has happened and what is planned for future visits.

How does this help with CQC inspections?

The CQC, at the point of inspection of your services, will ask five key questions in line with its single assessment framework (SAF). Is you service safe? Effective? Caring? Responsive to people’s needs? Well led?

Whilst parts of the assessment comprise speaking with your staff, opening up your service to inspectors greatly assists in transparently laying out how you work. From here, you can evidence that visits are being conducted by trained, compliant staff in a timely manner, that you consider and respond to the needs of your clients and that you provide the best possible environment in which your carers can succeed in delivering services.

This demonstrates that you’re safe, effective, responsive and well led. To help you with this, we’ve put together a comprehensive CQC inspection checklist, which you can get for free here.

Conclusion

With the aim of your service doubtless being outstanding care delivery to your clients, being able to easily monitor this constantly helps to keep your services on track all the time.

Making reporting and analysis part of your business process makes your services constantly transparent. This makes it easier to identify patterns in your business, understanding what’s working well and what could be improved.

It further helps in demonstrating the quality of your services to prospective clients. CQC inspections are irregular and imperfect as a means of showcasing suitability to clients, so being able to put an arm around their shoulder with aspects such as a friends and family portal makes your services transparent to your clients, too.

You have all the necessary information on your services already, but it’s making it easily accessible and transparent that’s often the difficult part. Certa aims to make this straightforward, putting reporting and insight front and centre of your care management software.

Check out our CQC checklist for a comprehensive guide to preparing for inspections, and head to www.caci.co.uk/certa for more information on Certa.

CQC inspections: what is the new framework & how often are inspections?

Posted on: 12 February 2025

The new CQC inspection framework poses five key questions of care services. Our checklist is designed to help you be prepared

CQC inspections are a challenging and stressful time for any care service provider. There is always an element of the unknown. However, if you have everything in place it can make the process as smooth as possible and alleviate much of the stress and uncertainty. We’ve created a free checklist that you can use to help prepare for your CQC inspections. To start, we wanted to look at the CQC inspection framework and how often are CQC inspections.

How often are CQC inspections?

How often CQC inspections are conducted on care services depends on when the care service was registered and the results of any previous inspections carried out.

For newly registered care services, they will be inspected within the first 12 months of opening.

If a care service achieves a ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ result, then they will be inspected again within the next five years. From CQC data available from August 2023, c.5% of adult social care services in England were rated as outstanding, or roughly 1200 services. Achieving such a result within the CQC’s new inspection framework satisfies them that a service is meeting or exceeding the minimum expectations of recipients of care.

Where a result falls below this and achieves a CQC inspection result of ‘requires improvement’, the CQC will inspect that service again within the next 12 months, until such a time that the CQC has determined that the service has improved.

Falling below that and achieving a result of ‘inadequate’ according to the CQC’s inspection framework means that a care service will be inspected within six months. Improvement in such services is considered urgent, so inspections are more frequent to ensure that the necessary improvements happen.

The CQC’s new inspection framework

The CQC’s new inspection framework is its single assessment framework (SAF). This CQC inspection framework asks five key questions of every service it inspects. The CQC asks if services are:

Safe
Effective
Caring
Responsive to people’s needs
Well led

By obtaining responses to these five key questions, the CQC’s new inspection framework gains deeper understanding of each care service. The CQC answers these questions by visiting the care service, speaking with employees and clients and going through care records, any complaints and feedback.

How often are CQC inspections and how can you ace them?

You want the answer to be ‘every five years’. Obviously, you want to be inspected as infrequently as possible. This is the surest sign that your care services are on the right path.

To help you in achieving this, we’ve put together a checklist that helps you to prepare for inspections inline with the CQC’s inspection framework.

The checklist takes you through each question in the single assessment framework (SAF), helping you to prepare documents, responses and ensure that staff are briefed prior to a CQC inspection.

Why not take a look? The checklist is free to download and you get your copy here.

School exclusions have doubled in the past decade. What can we do?

Posted on: 11 December 2024

School exclusions have been in the news again recently, with the BBC saying that they’ve doubled in the past decade. Fixed term exclusions, or suspensions, are twice as high as they were 10 years ago and permanent exclusions have shot up by 70%. Scratching beneath the surface of the numbers, 90% of those permanently excluded have special educational needs or disabilities (SEND). The numbers in the BBC’s report focus on primary schools, but this is a trend that we have discussed previously across the entirety of the education system.

What was clear then, too, was the disadvantaging of the disadvantaged. Children from deprived areas are far more likely to face some form of exclusion than their peers. This is evidenced by the likelihood of children eligible for free school meals facing exclusion. 67% of pupils with an exclusion or suspension at primary school had also been on free school meals, according to research by the children’s charity ChanceUK.

ChanceUK further finds that 90% of children excluded at primary school fail their English and Maths GCSEs. There is a lasting impact to exclusion, be it permanent or fixed, that an increasing number of children and their families are facing up to.

How can school exclusions be reduced?

The recurring link between disadvantage and SEND to school exclusions tells its own story. The longer children go with unmet needs, the longer their behaviour is going to be punished in school settings. Rather than understanding and interpreting a child’s behaviour, it can be easier for schools to exclude them. This, on the face of it, is justifiable, too. If a child is persistently disrupting lessons and impacting the education of their classmates, then the school has to act.

Identifying unmet needs earlier is essential. As we found out with Milton Keynes last year, 88% of children in contact with youth offending teams in the locality were found to have unidentified speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). “Communication and the understanding that comes from this is key to thinking, processing, anticipating and understanding consequences,” they told us. “If we carried on as if children automatically have these skills, when it was clear they don’t, this was a recipe for failure carrying consequences for these children and for the rest of society.”

Joining the dots between education and circumstance is essential. It’s imperative that understanding is built between schools and those pupils deemed disruptive. The likelihood of them falling into criminality rises exponentially once they are excluded, as evidenced by 88% of children in contact with youth justice services in Milton Keynes having SLCN.

Where context and understanding are built into the system around children, it makes it easier to identify those children most at risk of having SLCN and SEND. From there, preventative steps can be taken.

Can technology support a reduction in school exclusions?

The role of technology systems will be fundamental in reducing the number of school exclusions. More prosaic aspects such as the school admissions process can help to ensure that children are attending the right school. This extends to the right school in terms of locality to their home, increasing the likelihood of attendance. From there, any needs can be considered in a central system when assigning children to school places.

Where SEND is suspected, it’s important that referrals are made and assessments conducted as soon as possible. This will then lead into other aspects of the child’s journey such as education health and care plans (EHCPs). It is vital that all information is easily recorded and easily accessed by relevant parties involved in the child’s journey.

Making data easily accessible is an important point. Linking education to circumstances drives understanding. Creating a hub through which parents, schools and professionals can log and access information on a child makes navigating their journey more straightforward. It also builds rich data insights, further enhancing knowledge and understanding of processes that work in combatting aspects such as school exclusions.

Find out how Impulse can help

CACI’s education management system, Impulse, provides education services and local authorities with the information they need to understand each child’s journey. With specialist SEND, EHCP, admissions and social inclusion modules, it supports the parts of the process you need supporting.

At CACI, we also support more than 70% of youth justice services in the UK. This builds a clear link between education and youth justice, something that is prevalent in the case of school inclusions. Our work helps to support children and their families in that context. It also helps schools to prevent them from ever getting there.

For more information, contact us now.

Single view of a child – linking youth justice to education

Posted on: 18 November 2024

Whilst the operations of education and youth justice practitioners run separate from one another, there are areas of overlap. In these areas, information sharing and working from the same record can be beneficial to both parties. Ultimately, it is also beneficial to the young people involved. A shared understanding via a single view of each young person can help in both intervention and improving outcomes for vulnerable young people.

Common understanding over crucial matters is a prerequisite. For example, where children are arrested, their school must be informed. This means that schools need to be able to send and receive information to and from the police and youth justice workers.

Whilst that might be an extreme example, it does of course happen. The sharing of information is the crucial aspect here, though. How far can this be extended to improve outcomes for children? Such examples highlight that information sharing is possible.

Attendance records

With every child required to attend school, their attendance data is instructive, not only to their school and parents/carers, but where applicable, social and youth justice workers too. Where a young person who is in the youth justice system misses school, it is imperative that this information is shared with their youth justice team.

Children missing school is an obvious red flag to youth justice and social workers. Mandatory reporting on the attendance of looked after children is already in place, further reporting on children known to other external agencies can help them greatly.

Sharing information and data is a key area in preventing children and young people from falling through the cracks.

How can shared data help in a multi-agency scenario?

There are various estimates as to the number of children missing education. This depends upon the parameters set and the threshold of days missed. NCB estimates that the number is just shy of 50,000. This number is for children who are not registered at a school and are not receiving appropriate home schooling.

Running parallel to this is the estimate that some 50,000 children are involved in county lines drug dealing activities. Of course, not every child missing education is going to be involved in such activities, but the numbers bear a striking similarity. If children aren’t at school, what are they doing? Perhaps more pertinently, under the auspices of which agency do they fall?

When children fall into the youth justice sector, an understanding of their school attendance record can be insightful in painting a picture of their journey. Non-attendance gives some strong clues as to what they may have been doing. Establishing this data link with education can help youth justice teams and workers greatly.

Similarly, when a child moves school, it is beneficial that their new school has a clear record of them. If they have been involved with youth justice workers, it can help in understanding their background and their requirements. Similarly, where health concerns are prevalent, it’s important that the school has oversight of such information.

A single view of the child

This is a topic we’ve explored in our recent white paper. “At present we are seeing far too many examples of children not receiving the care they need because of a disjointed service and system response. Teachers, care and social workers, police, parents, local authority professionals and youth justice workers – even doctors and health professionals – are all stretched; piecing together a young person’s story from disparate information points makes an already challenging task even more so. Information on a young person is too often siloed and inaccessible.”

The information held by one agency is often valuable to another. Everyone is pulling in the same direction, so creating efficiency and a more joined-up response to the needs of vulnerable young people makes a great deal of sense.

This can be achieved with a single view of the child. If there’s a consistent record that can be accessed and added to by multiple agencies, it makes it far easier for disparate parts of the system response to work efficiently and effectively.

Conclusion

There are demonstrably strong ties between the work done in agencies such as schools and youth justice teams. Linking that work together, where necessary and appropriate, can help to improve outcomes for the children and young people in their services. It can further support the work of other professionals and agencies involved in a young person’s journey, too.

The technology exists today to help make a difference; to help join the dots in a journey. This helps to remove duplication of effort, guesswork and assumptions. If all parties can work around a single source of the truth, it makes understanding a young person’s journey and interpreting their story much easier. Bridging these gaps in understanding at schools and in youth justice teams can further help to tackle the complexity in each story. Having a basic understanding of their journey is so important in shaping their future.

This is a topic that we explored in our recent white paper, Single view of a child. You can download your free copy here.

Early Years funding rules have been in scope for change in recent times. How agile is your LA to the changes?

Posted on: 13 November 2024

Early Years funding is essential in providing the best possible outcomes to children from the outset of their educational journey. Funding depends on several factors. The rules themselves, too, are undergoing change. From eligibility to age of the child and the number of hours funded, local authorities need a system in place that can be agile to these changes. Failure to respond to Early Years funding changes can have a negative impact on children and their families. It is essential to be adaptable in the face of changing rules.

How does Early Years funding work?

Early Years funding is based on eligibility criteria. In September 2024, a new 15 hour working parent entitlement was introduced. This saw the expansion of funding extend down to nine-month-olds. In September 2025, the entitlement will be increasing to 30 hours.

This requires a re-working of the funding section of the software and systems utilised by local authorities in managing their Early Years funding. If the systems used can’t adapt to the changes, then it will necessitate a manual way of working out the rules and matching them to eligibility. This will further require manual effort in working out what is due to each provider.

Having a system in place that can work out who is owed what is important for accurate billing and payments. This includes clawbacks from providers where children have moved nursery. Without a system to support the process, human error becomes an increasingly viable factor, as do elements such as falsified and inaccurate claims.

With the rules in something of a state of flux at present, being agile to changes is vital.

How can technology support Early Years funding?

Technology can make the entire process of Early Years funding more accurate, easier for providers and easier for local authorities. Providers are required to submit headcounts to get funding from the local authority. Where local authorities can set providers up on a provider portal, it makes the process of submitting estimates, headcounts and amendments seamless for providers. It further makes the process easier for local authorities to track and manage.

This also makes it easier for the local authority to see what each provider is owed, as estimate payments are worked out, based on their bespoke percentage rules. When the providers then submit actuals through the portal, the local authority can immediately see what the outstanding balance is for each provider and settle it.

When rules change, your technology system should also be able to incorporate the new rules in a timely manner. This will result in a frictionless transition in your Early Years funding process.

How Impulse Nexus helps local authorities with their Early Years funding

We’ve designed Impulse Nexus to be responsive to rule changes, from funding periods to the age of children eligible. It is designed to make managing the end-to-end process easy. Impulse Nexus includes:

A providers’ portal through which they can submit estimates, actuals, headcounts and amendments

A live register of children at each provider

A banner to display which submission window is open, the status and how many days are remaining

A display of how many hours each child is claiming

Flags to indicate what each child is eligible for

The ability to bulk edit children’s hours

The provider can see a history of all submissions and how much was paid per child

The ability to reduce administrative time for your Early Years team

A full audit trail of submissions, payment rates and rejections

The ability to set your own funding periods, submission dates and rates

The ability to set up stretched funding models

Validation errors displayed in real time, with reasoning

Management area for local authorities to view and approve checks, validate the cross provider children, and children that haven’t yet been matched to a core record

The ability to customise funding types for legislation changes and regional requirements

Ultimately, Impulse Nexus provides you with a clear and consistent process in line with your local authority’s bespoke rules. We understand that each local authority has different rules and processes in place, so being able to implement your process is important. It’s also crucial to have a system in place that can be adapted to changes in legislation.

For more information, please visit our website.

Gaining a single view of the child in multi-agency scenarios

Posted on: 11 November 2024

Every child in the education and youth justice systems has their own, unique story. How can this story be accessed, understood and interpreted by the various agencies that they come into contact with? A single view of each child, which is accessible to the multiple agencies, helps to form a consistent thread of knowledge and understanding. This can be used to provide not only the best available care to each child, but to improve efficiency across the services they interact with.

There are several examples where different agencies require the same, or similar, information. Teachers, care and social workers, police, parents, local authority professionals and youth justice workers – even doctors and health professionals – are all stretched; piecing together a young person’s story from disparate information points makes an already challenging task even more so. Information on a young person is too often siloed and inaccessible.

Creating a single view carries many benefits for both children and professionals. This blog explores the benefits of a single view of a child. This is not to say a single system response – different technology works for different agencies. We explored how interoperability between systems will benefit children in a previous blog. This blog sets out to explore the benefit of achieving this single view.

Improved efficiency and cohesion

With resources stretched, efficiency gains are vital in being able to provide improved outcomes to more children. Where personnel and agencies change, a single view is vital in them being able to hit the ground running. Where information is inaccessible and difficult to interpret, it can result in the same questions being asked and the same ground being covered.

Make it easy for new practitioners

Turnover of staff is inevitable. Making it easy for new personnel is imperative. Not only does it create efficiency, but it makes their job much, much easier. Starting from scratch with any child or young person is a challenging phase, with the need to build understanding and trust with them, particularly in a youth justice and social care setting. If new practitioners to a child’s journey can access and interpret their story to date, it helps them to understand the child, which helps them to take proactive steps immediately towards improving their outcomes.

Improve understanding of each child

There is so much that plays into each child’s journey, and so much information that is relevant to it. From school attendance data to police and healthcare records, it is a constantly moving and evolving journey. A simple oversight of the agencies involved is instructive; what care have they received and from whom? This helps to not only understand each child individually, but to implement data mapping which forms a more holistic understanding of children in similar scenarios and what is the best way to help them.

Linking disparate responses

Each agency has information that is relevant to them and only them. Where the single view is beneficial is in areas of overlapping responses. For example, schools need to know if a pupil has been arrested. Similarly, if a child is diagnosed with SEND, that information is relevant to their entire educational journey. It is also useful information for youth justice workers in understanding young people in their services. A sharing of such information is vital in the multi-agency response to such children. If this information becomes siloed, it will hamper the response of other agencies to a young person.

Timely, accurate information

Once information is known, recording and sharing it with other agencies in a timely manner is crucial. Again, the single view is crucial, since it enables other agencies to access such relevant information against a child as soon as it is available. Accessing such information can help agency to tailor their response to a child as and when they need to interact with them.

Conclusion

The single view can be achieved in different ways, but it works to the same outcome: the improved outcomes of children and young people interacting with various agencies.

Where professionals can record their information, it is vital that it doesn’t become siloed. The sharing of relevant information with other agencies will fundamentally help them in achieving the goals they themselves set out to achieve. Everyone is pulling in the same direction, so it makes sense to support this with appropriate data sharing to enhance understanding of children and young people to improve their outcomes.

This is a topic that we have explore more comprehensively in our recent white paper, which you can download for free here.