Ekta Mehta, Author at CACI

Appeals and school admissions: how to handle them efficiently

Posted on: 28 February 2024

Appeals are an inevitable part of the school admissions process. How can they be effectively and efficiently handled to make the process easy and fair?

Effective and efficient handling of the school admissions process is essential to achieving the goal of a fair and transparent process for all. In this blog, we will look at the appeals process. Appeals are an inevitability. Every admissions authority will have to deal with them every year. In our last blog we looked at oversubscription criteria. They go hand-in-hand with appeals, since they are only required when more applications are received than there are school places available. Evidencing them, and how they’ve been adhered to, is essential to a fair and transparent appeals process.

The central tenets of the appeals process are twofold. Firstly, every parent has the right to appeal a place on behalf of their children. Secondly, the process must be fair and transparent. As we discussed previously, oversubscription criteria must be publicly available and their bespoke ordering by authority laid out.

The appeals process becomes a possibility when the authority rejects a child’s application. In rejecting it, the authority must:

Make clear the reasons why the application was rejected
Inform the parent of their right to appeal
State the deadline for submitting any appeal
Provide the necessary details to make any appeal
Inform the parent that they must set out their grounds for appeal

The report for the 2022/23 school year shows that there were 53,086 appeals; 38,186 for secondary school applications and 14,900 for primary schools. This that means that 3.5% of applications are appealed by parents. So, how can the process be handled fairly and transparently?

Efficient processing of appeals in the school admissions process

The School Admissions Code lays out that authorities must establish a panel to hear appeals. Where appeals are heard by a panel, the decision is binding; the school must either admit the child or the application is confirmed as rejected.

In the 2022/23 school year, 19.8% of appeals were successful. This shows that authorities are getting the majority of rejections right. Yet, mistakes do happen.

Technology can play a fundamental role in fair provision and oversight of the admissions process. Where a place has been rejected, for example, because a family resides outside of the catchment area, being able to show the working on this is essential. In a manual process, this means revisiting how the decision was reached. Linking to a geo-mapping application provides robust evidence in an instant.

Other criteria, such as faith, can quickly be evidenced, too. Where a parent hasn’t submitted relevant supporting documentation to evidence their child is of the same faith of the school, the authority can quickly demonstrate that other applications were accepted as a result of this.

Making the process easy for parents is paramount, too. With a parent portal, applications and appeals can be made easily and recorded against the child’s record simultaneously. This further helps with timelines, since any appeals process can be withdrawn after the established date for their submission has passed.

If a panel is convened to hear an appeal, they too can have easy access in one place to the process, the rejection and the grounds for appeal. This helps them to make better informed, fairer decisions.

Conclusion

Nothing can prevent appeals from happening. As the statistics show, they are a prevalent part of the school admission process. Rather, authorities need to be in the best possible position to respond to them.

Where the end-to-end process is handled in a central system, it makes evidence gathering, communications and reaching fair and transparent decisions much more straightforward. Messages and outcomes can be submitted and received via a central portal. This means that parents receive information instantly and can appeal via the same method.

Appeals are to be expected, so being in position to administer them is crucial. They are a central part of the overarching school admissions process. Having a system in place, linked to admissions and oversubscription criteria, helps to make the task of implanting a fair and transparent process much easier for everyone. If the system is simpler for schools and authorities, it will be for parents, too.

The technology exists now to make the admissions process easier to administer, as well as fairer and more transparent for children and their families.

This is a topic that we’ve covered in greater detail, examining the entire admissions process, in our recent white paper, A fair school admissions process for all. You can download a free copy here.

Managing oversubscription criteria in the school admissions process

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When an admissions authority receives more applications for a school than it has spaces available, it must order the provision of places according to its oversubscription criteria. These rules can be bespoke to each admissions authority. The criteria must be transparent and easy to understand, with a public outlining of the criteria available. So, how can this process be handled fairly and transparently?

Admissions arrangements must be in line with the School Admissions Code. “The purpose of this code is to ensure that all school places for maintained schools and academies are allocated and offered in an open and fair way.” The code has the force of law.

Exceptions to oversubscription criteria

There are exceptions to whom oversubscription criteria do not apply. Children with identified special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) who have an education health and care plan (EHCP) which specifically names a school, must be offered a place.

Once they have been offered a place, the highest priority must then be given to looked after children and previously looked after children.

Having a record of any EHCP or child looked after status in the authority’s system already makes it easy for admissions teams to validate the status of such an application. A joined-up approach is essential for handling applications fairly and transparently. A robust evidence base also makes handling appeals much easier.

Once EHCPs and children looked after have been allocated places, the rest of the applicants must be sorted through. In the easiest case scenario, there will be fewer applications than there are available place and, simply, they must all be offered a place.

Setting out your oversubscription criteria

Every admissions authority must set out its arrangements against which school places are allocated in the event of oversubscription. Each authority can define and order the criteria in their own way. There is no prescribed ordering of criteria, or even which criteria must be included.

The following is an inexhaustive and unindicative list of oversubscription criteria:

Siblings: It may sound obvious, but the authority must outline its interpretation of the term ‘sibling’. This is to cover step-siblings and adoptions. Linking family records in a central system makes defining and implementing the interpretation straightforward.
Catchment area: These must be designed by the authority to be reasonable and clearly defined. Linking this to digital mapping solutions can further help define a catchment in a system by considering factors such walking time to a school.
Feeder schools: These must be nominated by the authority and clearly defined. Linking records in a central system helps determine this, since obtaining current school attended information is easy.
Social and medical records: Authorities must clearly set out how social and medical records will be used in this context. Enabling parents to submit any records as part of their initial application makes the process easier for everyone.
Ability or aptitude: Any such requirements must be publicly available. Only grammar schools can base their entire intake based upon this.
Faith schools: Enabling parents to submit supporting documentation at the point of application makes determining this much easier for everyone. Where faith schools are undersubscribed, places must be offered to all applicants regardless of faith.
Children of staff: The School Admissions Code states that this applies to children of staff who have been working at the school for two or more years, or where the staff member has been recruited to fill a vacant post for which there is a demonstrable skills shortage. Linking records again helps to make determining this easier.

Conclusion

Oversubscription criteria are essential to a fair and transparent admissions process. Where places are appealed, a robust set of protocols also helps to argue the admission authority’s decisions.

It is also a process that can be automated. Where complete information on a child is held in an authority’s education management information system, all relevant information can be submitted by parents, schools and professionals, recorded against the child and considered when oversubscriptions criteria are called upon in the school admissions process.

This makes collecting evidence for appeals much more straightforward. No more manually trawling through records, aspects such as catchment areas can simply be called upon and put forward to an appeals panel.

It also makes determining admissions based on the bespoke criteria of the admissions authority much easier. To use catchment area as an example again, linking to mapping tools makes determining distance from a school incredibly straightforward. The decision can then be logged in the central system, with no need to resort to spreadsheets and physical copies of children’s records and the outcomes of their admissions.

The technology exists now to make the admissions process easier to administer, as well as fairer and more transparent for children and their families.

Reducing risk in the transport industry through workforce management

Posted on: 21 February 2024

Reducing risk entails several factors. Most pertinently, worker safety. Rules and regulations exist to protect workers, from health and safety directives to working time directives, covering working conditions to fatigue. Then there’s risk to projects and tasks. If they are done improperly, then tasks need to be redone. This impacts overarching projects, both in terms of time and cost. Of course, accidents and mistakes happen. Building in mitigation for such events is prudent. But what if you can identify patterns and head off errors before they happen? Competency management, as part of a robust workforce management process, can help.

Workforce management – training

Training management is essential across largescale workforces. From mandatory ongoing courses, refresher courses and training staff in new skills to upskill your workforce and offer career progression, having a robust training programme in place forms the backbone of this.

By linking training to other areas of your workforce management, such as assessments and scheduling, it makes it possible to identify skills gaps across your workforce. To reduce the risk of these gaps impacting upon project and service delivery, you can appropriately train existing members of staff to fill these gaps.

It also makes it possible to utilise your training programme to focus on specific areas and tasks where mistakes are occurring. By pooling data from accidents and assessments, you can identify repeat errors. In doing so, you can then tailor your approach to training to better prepare staff for areas in which, statistically, they are most likely to pose a risk to themselves and overarching projects.

Workforce management – assessments

Knowing that staff have the appropriate qualifications, skills, training and experience is one thing. But how are they actually fulfilling the tasks to which they have been assigned? Regular, ongoing assessments of your workforce are crucial. This is both from a safety and a service delivery perspective.

From a safety perspective, many roles within the transport industry pose a safety risk. From infrastructure workers to drivers, the risk of getting things wrong can be catastrophic. It’s prudent to check in to ensure that tasks are being conducted properly.

From a service delivery perspective, mistakes can result in shoddy work. This means that it needs to be redone, which costs time and money, impacting upon project timelines and budgets.

This extends to maintenance, too. We regularly see on the rail network, for example, things such as signal failures which result in delays and cancellations. Regular assessments of infrastructure are vital to repairing the roof whilst the sun is shining.

Overarching planning to manage risk

Proper, robust planning builds in sufficient time to complete tasks, with enough room for reasonable error. People make mistakes, external factors such as the weather can waylay you and where there are several moving parts. Things don’t always come together as you’d hope. Mitigating for this by building it into your planning is sensible.

When it comes to specific tasks, however, granular detail is important. When scheduling your workforce, workers can be assigned to shifts on a rolling basis ad infinitum. But how can the specifics and the complexity of each shift and its tasks be considered? How can these then be communicated with staff?

Using a central system with the ability to overlay such complexity onto shifts can drive efficiency and greater control of the overarching project and its processes. It can be established according to your bespoke business rules and configured to factor in elements such as regulations and directives.

Understanding what will happen during a shift is important. If maintenance needs to be performed, being able to communicate exactly what equipment is required, the nature of the task and the location helps to prepare people. As the process continues, being able to intelligently alter task timelines based upon previous completion times and rates enables a more accurate scheduling of tasks. If, for example, you have set aside three hours for the completion of a task but staff are regularly completing it in two hours, then future timelines can be adjusted accordingly.

This helps to drive a more complete understanding of your projects and how your staff are performing against timelines and tasks. This in turn helps to mitigate the risk of work running over time, since you can rely on a robust database of previous work to inform future projects.

Conclusion

Finally, the regulatory aspect is crucial. Things such as the working time directive exist to combat elements such as fatigue. A central database that can further call upon the geographic location of staff can help to more efficiently assign them to tasks. If someone is 20mins away from the location of a task, it makes more sense to assign them to it than someone 1hr away. Since travelling time is considered as a factor in fatigue management, it’s an extremely inefficient use of time to swallow it up on travelling times.

Managing risk extends across the entirety of the transport industry, from workforce safety to service delivery. With so many moving parts – risks – being able to navigate them and efficiently and reliably match those moving parts to your targets is essential to achieving the ultimate goals of your organisation. A well trained, regularly assessed and robustly scheduled workforce forms the backbone of this.

The technology exists to help largescale transport organisations to gain greater control of their workforce management. From training and assessments to scheduling, having a single view of your workforce facilitates automation, insight and, ultimately, efficiency. It’s a topic we’ve explored in more detail in our recent white paper, Tackling workforce management complexities in transport. You can download your free copy here.

Why changing your costing solution is essential for improvement

Posted on: 12 February 2024

Every NHS organisation has a costing system. However, not all costing systems can keep up with the changing demands and increased digitalisation required from organisations to continue delivering exceptional patient level costing outcomes.

In our previous blog on the future of costing, we explored how ICBs can effectively prepare for upcoming costing changes and how they can cut costs no matter their level of digital maturity or data comprehension. Today, we’ll uncover why now is the time to change your costing solution with the help of CACI and the benefits of doing so.

So, is it time to share your PLICS data? Does your costing system give you the opportunity to share patient level costing information and data analytics that will help you make the best decisions both now and in the future?

Why our costing solution, Synergy, is different

Synergy, CACI’s patient level information costing solution (PLICS), is uniquely designed for the NHS and transforms costing teams’ capabilities by:

Freeing up valuable time to analyse crucial results. Synergy ensures the NHS costing process is streamlined by enabling cost allocation, review and visualisation at patient level easily.
Keeping you in control of improving patient outcomes. With Synergy, your organisation will gain more control over your data and costing model and augment your understanding of the patient pathway and costs in your organisation.
Increasing self-sufficiency. Synergy comes with a user-friendly system that is easy for all levels within your costing team to use, promoting self-sufficiency.
Empowering stakeholder & ICS member collaboration through enhanced data sharing and revolutionised decision-making. Your organisation will gain access to class leading analytics that are produced by our in-house experts to promote benchmarking and streamline data sharing to ensure your costing team meets deadlines on time and on budget.
Redefining data reporting and sharing capabilities through distinct architecture. Synergy is a one-of-a-kind costing solution with its composition including a Data Mart layer, setting itself apart from traditional costing solutions by supplying users with total access to all of the data within their costing system and boundless data sharing both within the organisation and to external partners.

Why it’s time to change your costing solution to Synergy

Transitioning from your costing solution to Synergy is simple. No IT skills are needed for set-up, and it can be easily and securely deployed in an HSCN connected data centre within a matter of weeks. You will be part of a highly engaged user community that meet regularly to share best practices and insights on product development.

How CACI can help you migrate costing solutions

CACI works with costing teams across the UK to help them gain a deeper understanding of their patient pathways and costs and make decisions that improve patient outcomes. If you’d like to find out more about changing your costing solution to Synergy, please contact one of our experts, Susan Brooks.

Read the first blog in our future of costing series here.

CACI and ChildView – committed to youth justice

Posted on: 16 January 2024

The youth justice domain never stands still. As we create more data and more incisive ways to record and interpret practice and outcomes, we increasingly discover new patterns. These patterns are put to use in achieving our ultimate aim: improved outcomes for the most vulnerable children in our society. Where we can identify unmet needs earlier, we can enable prevention rather than reaction. Where we can know what is not working as well as evaluate what works, we can enact flexible options sooner, when and where they are needed. In depth data mapping of demand and responses is a vital support to frontline youth justice services. Such information has the power to show long-term socio-economic impact. This requires continuous improvements in the application of relevant research and tools and is why CACI remains fully committed to the domain.

CACI’s ChildView software has been the system of choice for youth justice teams across England and Wales for over 25 years. ChildView supports the entire country of Wales and more than 65% of England’s youth justice teams. We understand for several years it has been a challenging time in the domain; budgets have reduced, skilled staff have been hard to retain, populations are expanding and the cost of living crisis is only serving to exacerbate social issues and stress which leads to avoidable vulnerability exposing children to harm.

There’s much talk of efficiency, but efficacy is arguably more important. We are committed to continuous development of ChildView to demonstrate effective and efficient use of resources. However, as the largest and only specialist supplier we can uniquely focus on the YOS partnership to provide tools to generate whole system insights and enable collaborative innovation at a local and regional level. ChildView’s ongoing future roadmap focusses on reduced effort to create deeper insights about making a local difference at its core. We have been around for a long time and we intend to build on our unique know how for a lot longer yet.

That’s why we will work more closely with our customers at a regional level as well as the Youth Justice Board (YJB). We will ensure that ChildView provides compliance with YJB standards by actively helping with implementation in the majority of YOSs and to make ongoing changes to achieve the aims of the YJB. Unique ChildView full case data exchange between CACI systems makes it easier, quicker and more secure to share whole child journey data on young people. This means that rich practice records are shared in a consistent fashion to promote ongoing engagement to reduce risk and build resilience. It helps to ensure continuity and ongoing engagement as young people move between different services and localities, too.

Behind compliance and reporting, however, we understand partnerships and practitioners are working with real life stories, not just data points. Every young person has their own story and their own context. Understanding this is vital to engaging and making a difference to their outcomes.

Being able to record often complex and nuanced information on a child at several levels is essential. With multi-agency touchpoints, bringing all of this together into single, relevant dynamic views of the child helps make many more accurate decisions quickly to efficiently navigate multi agency scenarios. This can help to reduce noise and effort through uncertainty and unknowns as well as reduce duplication and questions to appreciate the battles with systemic trauma and trust in the services intending to engage positively with children and young people.

“Childview has been crucial in all of this in providing the opportunity to capture and analyse significant amounts of data on the different cohorts of children covered under the different strands of Milton Keynes’s Early Support Project,” says Diz Minnitt, head of youth justice and service support at Milton Keynes. “Further, Childview uniquely allows life event characteristics such as undiagnosed speech, language and communication needs, trauma and ACEs to be captured and used to add value to the analysis. This enables us to create rich sub-sets of our prevention data and thoroughly learn about what impact we are having and what is working. We can look at the numbers and the work we are doing that makes a difference.”

Creating such tangible insights drives us forwards. We are fully committed to supporting the future of youth justice and developing multi-agency partnerships in the vital work that you do and its outcomes for our society. We offer a unique team comprised of ex-service professionals who carry your and their passion for this uniquely challenging specialist work.

Unmet needs and data driven decisions: how Milton Keynes uses technology to support vulnerable young people

Posted on: 12 December 2023

In the first part of our case study with Milton Keynes Youth Offending Team we explored how the team uses ChildView. We examined how the system supports the team’s administrative functions such as reporting, and how the YOT is supported by CACI. In this, the second part of the case study, we sat down with Diz Minnitt, head of youth justice and support service at Milton Keynes, to look at the benefits ChildView has brought to the council outside of its office walls. How does ChildView support work with vulnerable young people in a rapidly expanding population? What tangible difference does flexible reporting bring to the YOT? How does technology help to join the dots in each young person’s journey to provide a single view of them, helping to improve outcomes and reduce elements such as reoffending? How can systems support in identifying more unmet earlier, to help with prevention?

We start by taking a broader perspective on the multi-agency approach within Milton Keynes. The MK Together Safeguarding Partnership brings together senior leaders from key agencies in Milton Keynes to agree ways to co-ordinate local safeguarding services, act as a strategic leadership group in supporting and engaging others and implement local and national learning, including from serious child safeguarding incidents. It has created an improvement in communication and accountability with the right people routinely updated.

“Working within this context has provided an opportunity for us to advocate on the part of people and families that the local authorities are working with,” begins Diz. “These are very vulnerable people and families; children in care, children in need and youth with unmet needs who are in the criminal justice system. We’re really starting to realise the importance of unmet needs and increasing our understanding of what stronger partnership working can achieve.”

Unmet needs – speech, language and communication needs (SLCN)

Following research and partnership work with the Association of Youth Offending Team Managers AYM in 2016, Diz told us about his original focus on identifying speech and language needs and developing what the YOS could do to help. “Following professor Karen Bryan’s original study in 2007, which identified 60% of children in contact with YOTs as having speech, language and communication needs, in 2008 we undertook our own four-month study with a speech and language therapist.

“We focused the assessments on key sub-groups in the service, those with repeat offending, disrupted education history or no education provision and those with suspected SEND (special educational needs and disabilities), and what we found was that 88% of these groups had significant SLCN – significantly higher than professor Bryan’s 60%.

“This was much closer to Prof Bryan’s figure of 60-90% for young people in custody, but what it highlighted was that there was a majority of those in contact with the service who had undiagnosed SLCN. Furthermore, these needs are very difficult to spot without a full assessment and hence are often referred to as hidden disabilities.

“Having effectively tested and proved the findings of professor Bryan’s academic study as a local reality in the high risk groups, particularly among young people who are repeat offenders, it was clear to me that such crucial unmet needs should inform youth justice and prevention practice across the entire system. Communication and the understanding that comes from this is key to thinking, processing, anticipating and understanding consequences. 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.”

Connecting multiple agencies and teams

“It’s essential to reflect the importance of interconnection to this, too,” says Diz. “Most organisations, even those within the same local authority, frequently operate in siloes. They focus and prioritise the work that they need to do, that applies directly to them. However, achieving shared applied learning across the whole system to real life situations is the real world challenge and ultimately helps in achieving the goal of improving outcomes for vulnerable children.

“For example, it’s very clear that there’s an increased chance of a child with unmet needs entering the youth justice system. With the right focus this risk can be significantly reduced. Where people do not take a holistic view of this known risk, opportunities get missed and all professionals and departments don’t get the benefit from the insights and feedback that come from identification.”

Funding new projects, finding evidence

“For a new prevention project, you can only get funding once there’s a proof of concept,” explains Diz. “The SEND team at Milton Keynes initially picked up the bill for the speech and language therapy provision after the initial four-month funded period as they could see the benefits it would bring. Further funding for speech and language therapists was then obtained from NHS England, the Office for the Police and Crime Commissioner, the Home Office and most recently as part of Turnaround funding.

“This has consistently increased our screening and assessment capacity, meaning that we could identify SLCN earlier and can now clearly evidence that 88% of children and young people in contact with the service have SLCN. Milton Keynes is now one of a handful of youth justice services in the UK with speech and language therapists (SLTs) embedded in the team where an SLCN assessment is conducted by an SLT with every child.

“These assessments enable all of those professionals working with the child and their family to have greater insight, providing real opportunities for coherent, coordinated working with the child’s needs at the forefront.

“This complements the wider SEND focus and the understanding of needs arising from adverse childhood experiences amongst children across Milton Keynes. It also helps us to target interconnection with other parts of Milton Keynes’s services.”

“Like many Youth Offending Services we were in a position where we could see the impact as other services were cut due to the impact of austerity measures around funding. We had already begun to see the benefit of SLCN assessments and we had the evidence that children coming into the YJ system weren’t having their needs identified prior to contact with the YOT.

“As SEND support to schools started to be charged for we could see a nightmare scenario with the levels of children with previously unrecognised and unmet needs increasing as a direct consequence of schools being forced to make challenging decisions about how they use their reducing resources.

“To seek to counteract this predicted increase we started working with both secondary and primary schools offering SLCN assessments for their children who were at greatest risk of exclusion. With these assessments we discovered that 96% of those that schools had considered excluding have SLCN, confirming the ‘hidden disability’ impact of SLCN.

Promoting Reintegration Reducing Exclusion

“As well as providing free assessments to the schools, we also provided free specialist training around how to work effectively with children with SLCN and a host of other associated SEND needs. This removed a barrier as schools were no longer having to justify difficult choices with their budgets and enabled schools to develop better ways to support individual children and to adapt the whole school environment to enable swifter identification and support for those children with SLCN.

“This approach also supported a more compassionate way of thinking regarding challenging behaviour as we stress that, supported by the evidence, behaviour is an indicator of underlying causes that needs to be explored and understood.

“We have connected with different organisations to establish and evidence the research links and we saw more interconnects and overlaps with ACEs and SLCN. SLCN is not the only need, but its identification is frequently indicative of other symptoms of complex underlying needs. Identifying SLCN can trigger the process of further investigation.

“This overall approach is based upon our increasing knowledge of the needs that ultimately result in children finding themselves in the youth justice system. We can see clearly when this journey starts to arise and by definition the more we can go up these known tributaries to identify and meet needs earlier the more we can prevent children from being excluded from school, moved into alternative education or placed on part time timetables, finding themselves exploited or involved in offending behaviour.

“We need to use all of the information available to intelligently adapt the system collectively to identify and meet needs earlier. These children do not have the luxury of pausing, rewinding and replaying their lives if we collectively as professionals get it wrong or lack diligence and professional curiosity in our approach.”

“Childview has proved essential in enabling us to capture and extract the data needed for the evaluation of Promoting Reintegration Reducing Exclusion (PRRE) that has been undertaken by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology (CIC) in Cambridge University. The CIC are due to present their report imminently, but this was commissioned following some of the early indicators of PRRE which highlighted that we potentially see examples of unconscious adultification of children. The current systems in schools can become too focused on the behaviours without seeing beyond these to other symptoms and root causes of that behaviour. They can fail to understand reasons for the presenting behaviour and therefore can act to exclude prematurely.”

Data driven decisions

“With the introduction of the Early Support Project in 2018 we saw a 25% reduction in first time entrants to the youth justice system in its first 12 months.

“Milton Keynes is growing rapidly as a city and our resources haven’t always been tailored to match this growth. There has been an increase in gang-related activities post-Covid with an increase in the number of children coming into the system who were previously unknown to our services and those of key partner agencies. This reinforces the importance for us to act earlier.

“Milton Keynes also has a very young population which means a larger population pool of potential first time entrants into our youth justice system. Following an increase in knife related offences we developed a new strand of the ESP, ACT-Now which is focused explicitly on this area. Our ACT-Now model works by establishing direct contact with a young person whilst they are still in police custody within 90-minutes of us being contacted by the police. We then have a follow up visit with the young person and parents/carers within 48 hours to agree how we can work with them voluntarily. This has led to very positive engagement and a very low level of reoffending to date by those children who have been supported using this model. None of the reoffending to date (around 5%) has related to further knife carrying.

“The ACT-Now work has been funded by the Police and Crime Commissioner and the initial success led to the same approach being funded by him to operate in Slough and other parts of the Thames Valley area are being considered for further expansion. ACT-Now is being viewed very positively by the Home Secretary who is monitoring progress with the approach and it has recently been shared as a model of best practice amongst the network of police and crime commissioners.

“As well as significantly increasing timeliness of dealing with these offences, which is crucial for young people to understand the consequences of their actions, we are seeing improved outcomes for these young people and reduced reoffending rates.

“The cost argument is very effective for the police. Their approach is different to ours, but the outcomes are mutually beneficial. It’s cost effective and demonstrably reducing repeat offending. Reduced crime means fewer victims and we can demonstrate this from our data captured in detail in Childview.

Using ChildView to tackle capture and analyse data for tangible action points

“The Early Support Project aims to measure the reoffending rate over two years. The rate for young people who have been through the service is currently 1.81% and we have worked with c.500 young people. We know that the methodology, therefore, works. Correctly identifying needs earlier greatly improves outcomes for these young people.

“Childview has been crucial in all of this in providing the opportunity to capture and analyse significant amounts of data on the different cohorts of children covered under the different strands of the Early Support Project. For many years we have used the prevention extended functionality which we purchased. The identify tool is extremely adaptable, enabling us to add different elements for the various strands, such as new screening and assessment methodologies. We can capture data about the different elements of the project work, most importantly providing verifiable evidence around the impacts and outcomes achieved.

“Further, Childview uniquely allows life event characteristics such as undiagnosed SLCN, trauma and ACEs to be captured and used to add value to the analysis. This enables us to create rich sub-sets of our prevention data and thoroughly learn about what impact we are having and what is working. We can look at the numbers, the work we are doing that makes a difference and the profiles in our Early Support Project, Turnaround, ACT-Now and PRRE.

“We need to analyse the pathways of all these cases via logging their identified adverse and trauma life experiences as well as referrals in and out of our projects. These include referrals for SLCN, SEND, substance use and mental health. ChildView is a flexible and adaptable system that enables us to track all of our different service and project approaches and methodologies.”

Youth Resilience Project

“Our Youth Resilience Project offers one-to-one mentoring at all stages of the youth justice pathway supplementing other models through support that is available end-to-end. It can be used at the beginning of their journey, for those children just starting to work with the service or those who already engaged with us, through to those transitioning out of the youth justice system.

“ChildView’s additional functionality helps us to differentiate needs from data captured and to enquire about the ways we can facilitate targeted prevention and help to children. It enables us to build practice-based evidence and utilise this information to inform where we need to build service system capacity and capability to reduce or eliminate criminal behaviour. Having the flexibility to shape and use our data from local project work is essential to us, this helps to reveal patterns and insight from our work and therefore to evidence and highlight the resources needed.

“However, ChildView also provides a standard framework for monitoring youth justice, for example first time entrants, offending and reoffending to ensure we create consistent information about impact. We aim to always focus on improving outcomes and data is essential to achieving this. The outcomes for children are ultimately what matters.

“All members of the team can access the data and interpret it. It’s transparent and accessible across the service. Because we share a common system with many other services in Thames Valley we can share our methodologies, learning and customisation with other youth justice services. This helps us to pool and build knowledge and approaches to improve outcomes for children in our domain.”

How do ICBs successfully prepare for future changes in costing?

Posted on: 27 November 2023

Integrated care boards (ICBs) were born to bring the NHS together locally to improve population health and establish and achieve shared strategic priorities. Although ICBs are vital to the future delivery and improvement of healthcare systems, their introduction has not been without hurdles.

Earlier this year, NHS England challenged ICBs to reduce their running costs by at least 20% in 2024/25 and 30% by 2025/26. This comes with heightened challenges of digital and data not being prioritised at board level in most areas, with only 38% of ICBs having an Executive Director focused on digital, data or intelligence.

With fast-approaching deadlines to meet, what can ICBs do to cut costs no matter the comprehension level of digital or data?

Where can ICBs make savings?

Reallocating & distributing funding

To supply optimal patient level care, ICBs must be equipped with an optimal patient level costing solution. Now more than ever, it is critical for ICBs to work with NHS providers to create a single view of population and personal health and collect and utilise high-quality data to drive cost efficiencies. ICS leaders remain concerned about funding available for patient treatments and recognise that this is essential to uphold the sector’s productivity. NHS funding has always been focused on treating single acute illnesses and single chronic conditions or injuries rather than preventing them. It is now more focused on treating the whole patient and considering the prevention agenda.

To direct patient treatment funding to the most effective setting, ICBs must innately understand the cost of each patient pathway across all settings in the system.

Organising critical data for optimal use

When it comes to organising critical data, it is integral that ICBs have a strong working relationship with local governments, providers and the VCFSE sector to faciliate this. A framework of data sharing standards should also be developed to achieve enhanced interoperability and data sharing across organisational barriers to further encourage cost efficiencies.

Third-party support to meet priorities and achieve strategic objectives

ICBs unite stakeholders across the healthcare sector to address immediate and long-term priorities and challenges to improve health outcomes. Effectively addressing this requires ICBs to enhance their self-sufficiency and self-improving systems by working with the NHS and third-party partners to develop robust shareable models and fine-tune skills locally. Considering this, ICB leaders are continuously seeking out new opportunities ways to leverage system providers’ skillsets and contributions, and remain positive about system providers’ commitment and contribution. Increased self-sufficiency and self-improvement will also free up NHS funding for ICBs to better address priorities and challenges.

Data sharing

While ICSs exist because of collaboration and partnerships between their providers, sharing usable data between the providers isn’t straightforward. If ICBs could safely and securely share data, connect data and run true system data analysis from required data sources, they would be able to accelerate their work in various activities from improving patient and staff care and outcomes to optimising the productivity of the wider health and care system at cost.

Delivering training & knowledge sharing opportunities

ICBs have been strongly encouraged to enhance their existing peer review processes to allow for inter-ICS benchmarking, best practice sharing and accountability strengthening to drive cost efficiencies. NHS Trust leaders have felt incredibly positive about ICBs’ role in fostering a sense of shared responsibility and collective endeavour among system partners, their collective problem-solving abilities and their sharing of practices on patient care and outcomes are key to future system and healthcare improvements.

Making the future of costings successful with CACI

Although the journey towards cost efficiencies for ICBs undoubtedly comes with hurdles to jump, CACI’s expert team are equipped with the necessary industry knowledge and experience in data transformation to support and enable a revolutionary journey to a successful SMART result.

To find out how we can help prepare your ICB for a successful journey, please contact one of our experts, Susan Brooks.

The benefits St. Helens Youth Justice Service realises from CACI’s fully managed hosting solution

Posted on: 24 October 2023

St Helens Youth Justice Service has been using ChildView from CACI for over 15 years. In May 2020 it decided to utilise CACI’s fully managed hosting solution to support its work. In this case study, we speak to Helen Williams, St Helens Youth Justice Service’s Information Officer about why the council decided to use the service and the benefits that it has brought about.

“One of the main reasons we decided to use the fully managed hosting service was to take the burden off the council’s internal IT department,” explains Helen. “Previously, any upgrades and issues went through that department. Being the council’s team, they are always very busy. We had to log issues with the internal helpdesk and take it from there. Given the scope of the council’s operations and the fact that we’re a small part of it, it often depended on who you got to speak to within the IT team as to whether they would fully understand the software and the problem. Now, when we go through CACI’s helpdesk, we know that we’ll be speaking to someone who fully understands the software and can help us immediately with the problem.

“Another factor was storage and server space. We hold a lot of data and this was taking up a lot of space in the council’s server room. The council was trying to reduce the number of servers it was hosting internally, so the offer from CACI to host our data was an appealing one. This also meant that we were able to utilise CACI’s security arrangements, whilst at the same time reducing the amount of space we were taking up in the council.”

Security was another factor for St Helens Youth Justice Service. CACI meets rigorous international security standards and is routinely tested to identify potential weaknesses. This enables customers to leverage CACI’s security spend in protecting their own data.

“We recently suffered a cyber-attack at the council which shut down most of our systems and we, as a council, lost access to a number of databases,” says Helen. “Because ChildView is hosted separately, however, we were still able to access the system and our data. This meant that we could continue to focus on our work, improving outcomes for the young people in our services.

“It also highlighted that we always have easy access to our data. I can grant access to the data to other people as required very easily and securely. The data works across other systems that we work with, too, making it easy to call upon and rely on.”

Efficiency is often a buzzword in local services. How can it be achieved? St Helens Youth Justice Service no longer has to wait for internal mechanisms to be run before upgrading ChildView or resolving any issues in the system. “Everything is much quicker now,” says Helen. “Any updates that we need are scheduled and done, there’s no hassle.

“Previously there was a lot of back and forth on available dates and when would be best to conduct the updates. Then there were times when our internal IT team were unsure of exactly what they needed to do. It’s now just much quicker.”

“It’s the same as the CACI helpdesk. I can grant them remote access to my desktop and they can fix issues instantly. There’s no more logging the issues with our internal IT department and hoping that someone can fix it quickly. It just gets done now.”

Finally, there’s the issue of cost benefit and cost efficiency. “The people operating above us, who sign off on expenditure such as this, can see the value in the service and are supportive of us using it, so there has been no issue on that front,” concludes Helen. “We have to justify the value, of course, but in terms of security, data access and space saved, it satisfies this. Our council understands the cost benefit of this and we’ve got support for it internally.”

For more information on how CACI’s fully managed hosting service supports youth justice services, please click here.

What do you get from your education software provider?

Posted on: 5 October 2023

The education software and integrated systems that you use to underpin your education services and processes are vital to the effective and efficient operation and oversight of your services. From early years to admissions and transfers, SEND/ALN to virtual school services, technology plays a fundamental role in efficient, effective and fair educational services to meet increasingly complex objectives. But what are your services getting from your software providers? From initial training through to ongoing support and maintenance, your providers play an important role themselves in sustaining your services.

Selecting the right technology means selecting the right partner. It’s not simply a case of buying a system and then switching it on. There’s an implementation to be planned and programmed, data to be exported, cleansed and imported. Then there are ongoing support needs and updates required over time to keep the system secure, compliant and supporting your evolving needs.

Getting started with your education software

Once a decision has been made, how are you going to get your team up to speed with your new education software? Ensuring that training is included in the procurement process is essential. So too is agreeing costs for any extra sessions, such as training and development.

Running parallel to this is ensuring that the configuration of local process covers everything you need. We’ve seen many cases where authorities have purchased the minimum viable product to meet procurement thresholds. They’ve then found layer upon layer of additional cost once they’ve gone live. These costs cover anything from additional infrastructure to third party licence agreements in order to get the system working.

Understanding these hidden extras can greatly help in gaining a more accurate cost of your education software. Building upon minimum viable products can be timely as well as expensive. Mapping this all out can minimise friction and disruption upon implementation. Better still, identifying a partner which has the experience and capability to work with local issues out of the box brings everything into scope upfront. Understanding how ongoing changes will be managed further helps to achieve your objectives over time.

How will your education software be updated?

Another issue we see repeatedly is the downtime associated with upgrades and maintenance. This covers everything from enhancements to the software to critical security patches. Standalone systems can help with this. They can help in greatly reducing the time your software is unavailable for. Any necessary work can also be conducted at times that best suit you.

Where your education software is linked to another piece of software within the same suite of products, updating one facet requires the downtime of everything else, too. So, for example, if your education software provider needs to update another system that is entirely unrelated to education and the work you do, but sits on the same architecture, it will mean that your software will be unavailable whilst their systems are updated.

IMPULSE Nexus – what you see is what you get

CACI has designed its IMPULSE Nexus education software to suit the needs of local authorities like yours. It is modular by design, so you can pick up and plug in the parts that you need. This means you’re free to use as much or as little of IMPULSE Nexus as your needs require.

All our pricing is upfront and transparent. You don’t have to pay for the bits of the software that you don’t need. This helps you manage your overarching software ecosystem that can use IMPULSE Nexus as part, or the heart of it.

Like everyone else, we do conduct upgrade work to IMPULSE Nexus. As a standalone system, however, we can work with you on the best time to conduct these. There are three every year, so there’s always advance warning and time to make arrangements. We also offer a hosting solution which means that we can carry out these upgrades for you as a fully managed service. This further reduces friction and minimises downtime.

Furthermore, as IMPULSE Nexus is a standalone system, any upgrade work won’t impact your integrated systems.

Where you need further support from the team at CACI, our costs are transparent and upfront. Our annual advisory service (AAS) days are bookable in advance or as and when you need them. These are designed to help you with everything from project management to additional training. You can find out more here.

IMPULSE Nexus is used by authorities across the UK, including Birmingham City Council. You can find out more about how it uses IMPULSE Nexus to handle its admissions process here.

If you would like more information on IMPULSE Nexus, please visit our website here.

Trauma informed practice – how a West Midlands coalition is changing things

Posted on: 20 September 2023

The idea of trauma informed practice has been around for a while now (SAMHSA 2014). It remains, however, a burgeoning area of practice. The West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) is attempting to take this forward into commissioning policy. Through a coalition of public service agencies, it aims to promote a framework for trauma informed practice in the region. Knowledge, practice-based evidence, data sharing, combined training and service inputs will set new pathways towards achieving better outcomes for all children in the region.

“Trauma informed practice is a journey, not a destination,” says Lucy Cavell Senior Trauma Informed Practitioner at Barnardo’s, the children’s charity which is coordinating the work of the WMCA trauma informed coalition which sets a policy direction. “There are different approaches in the seven constituent local authorities. For example, Birmingham City Council has a slightly different flavour to other organisations, having taken a holistic approach to training around trauma informed practice within children’s services and schools.

“We’re creating a community of practice on behalf of the coalition. There’s a sharing of knowledge and of best practice being implemented. The coalition is a reflective space with strategic support for locally based networks. It accepts the regional differences in localities such as Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton, but it’s still early days, we’re still learning, gathering knowledge and promoting connections and promoting building the evidence base.”

Trauma informed practice in the West Midlands

The WMCA trauma informed coalition was established in 2022 in response to Punishing Abuse, to develop trauma informed practice in the localities. It includes the West Midlands police force, public health, primary care, local authority children’s services, schools, faith groups and charities including homelessness, temporary accommodation, drug, alcohol, domestic violence and mental health. The trauma informed coalition is borrowing from the learning about violence reduction and service developments in Scotland and other regions, such as in Wales, aiming to adapt this to the history and demographics of the WMCA.

“We saw the potential in being involved in such a coalition and the benefit that it can bring to so many vulnerable children,” says Lucy. “Punishing Abuse is a powerful piece of work that demands action. One of the primary barriers to this is siloed short-term responses. Services interact with children in the way that they see as being most appropriate and that makes sense to them. Children move in and out to other areas of the regional system with unseen and unmet needs and are dealt with in an entirely different way.” The importance of a more optimal and joined-up approach which is able to consider much more of the individual context of each child’s journey is something we’ve written about previously.

“One aspect has been the simple creation of training material to promote trauma informed practice,” says Lucy. “We’ve seen real leadership buy-in from the police, with training delivered to over 2,300 officers and staff so far. This covers the basics, from psychology and behaviours to appropriate skills in formulating partnership responses. This has seen a much more compassionate response from the police towards children, young people and families and their communities. Simply by understanding their behaviours differently it has increased the window of tolerance in police settings.”

What the future will bring

There is no blueprint for trauma informed practice and it remains a development area of work with vulnerable young people and their families. As Lucy outlines, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will work.

“We hope that establishing a trauma informed framework via the coalition will at least set us on the path to end the punishment of abuse,” concludes Lucy. “The goal is to commission interventions that facilitate systemic resilience. Of particular interest and relevance to establishing a consistent unified approach across Educational settings is the Trauma Informed and Attachment Aware Schools regional certification model, informed by the work of ARC, Virtual Schools, Educational Psychology Services and Barnardo’s in the region.

“At the heart of the coalition is the intention to engage with adversity and trauma in regional localities to meet needs in an optimal way. Further, to promote evidence from effective collaborative partnership practice by capturing, monitoring and sharing relevant data and the context of individual, family and community adversity and trauma ethically. The objective is to make smarter service commissioning investments for the longer-term future of the region. There will be a need to step back to see what works and what doesn’t. It is, after all, early days.”

In the second part of this blog series, we will take a closer look at what success looks like for the WMCA trauma informed coalition.