Solihull Council has chosen CACI’s ChildView youth justice software to underpin its youth justice work in the area. As part of the move to enhance engagement with young people and improve their outcomes, Solihull Council has sought to strategically evolve its services. Partnering with CACI will help Solihull Council in engaging with young people, recording their journeys and data mapping their outcomes for the benefit of all young people in their services.
ChildView will support Solihull’s youth justice practitioners by providing a holistic view of the council’s services. This will help Solihull’s youth justice team to efficiently and effectively deliver its vital frontline services, gaining deeper insight and understanding of the journeys it seeks to improve.
“Following a detailed consideration of the requirements for our Youth Offending Service, our engagement with young people and extensive market research, Solihull Council is pleased to announce CACI as our new Youth Justice partner,” says Zubair Afzal, consultant programme manager ant Solihull Council. “We look forward to delivering an improved Youth Justice offer in collaboration with CACI.”
“We’re delighted that Solihull Council has chosen our ChildView youth justice software to underpin its vital service delivery,” says Phil Lucy, director of CACI’s Children & Young Person’s division. “It’s an exciting opportunity for us to expand upon our service delivery in the West Midlands and support Solihull Council in evolving and enhancing its service delivery to vulnerable young people.”
Scheduling is the glue that keeps organisations together. It provides clarity over tasks to be completed and helps management teams in looking back to see what has been achieved. Who performed what tasks and when? How did they do? In times of employee strain, when workforces are stretched – something we’ve seen a lot of during Covid – having an agile scheduling tool is vital for firms in keeping their projects and services running. Without a robust scheduling framework, organisations are at the mercy of guesswork and good fortune.
Scheduling pervades every aspect of company life. At a basic level, the majority of working contracts outline expected hours along the lines of the 9-5 theme. From there, employees are expected to complete tasks in a timely fashion. Staying on top of individuals is easy enough, but what if you have an entire workforce to assign tasks to and track? In industries such as healthcare, transport and construction, project completion and service delivery are dependent upon the input of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of staff members.
In such organisations, a central administrative team needs to assign tasks to employees to ensure that projects and services can be delivered effectively and efficiently. It can be akin to moving chess pieces around a board, using different pieces in different ways to attack the tasks at hand. From time to time you also need to go on the defensive, when projects overrun, or services are disrupted.
To fill your tasks, an understanding of what each employee is competent in is vital. You can’t use a knight to do a bishop’s job, to labour the chess analogy. Manually researching who can step in to fill a role is a painstaking process. It’s also a waste of time, since with a robust scheduling system, it is something that can be done automatically.
Quickly filtering through employees and instantly understanding their training, competencies and experiences facilitates swift and efficient decision making. Further understanding of their existing schedule enables administrators to assign tasks within business rules and legally contractable hours.
By setting out schedules in advance, organisations can clearly communicate with their employees and enable them due oversight of their shifts and tasks. Within a centralised scheduling system, it is also possible to facilitate the swapping of schedules between staff members to provide flexibility.
Your business rules, your scheduling
Everything can be completed within the boundaries of your business rules. Each organisation has its own unique ways of working, so catering for these on a case-by-case basis is vital. This can also be true of individual departments within an organisation. For example, many contracts reward staff for longer service with the provision of extra annual leave. Holidays need to be factored in, as do the rules around when a certain number of employees can be off at any given moment.
Factoring in overtime and how that’s dealt with, in terms of overrunning projects, compensation and the impact it has on future shifts, also requires careful consideration. Considering these elements in an automated fashion facilitates not only swift decision making, but also fair and consistent decision making.
External and internal regulations also need to be factored into your scheduling process. Aspects such as fatigue management can easily get overlooked when there’s pressure on to finish projects and tasks, but ignoring them can be costly.
Renown Consultants Limited was fined £450,000 with £300,000 in costs in 2020 after being convicted under the Health and Safety at Work Act. The company had failed to ensure that two of its workers were sufficiently rested to travel home after a shift in 2013. The two employees were driving from Stevenage to Doncaster after a nightshift when the driver fell asleep, resulting in a collision which was fatal to both passengers.
Travel times to and from shifts that require safety intensive work to be conducted must be factored in. Clearly, travelling from Stevenage to Doncaster is a lengthy journey – 133 miles. Again, a robust scheduling solution can help factor in aspects such as distances and potential travel times. This can help to avoid unnecessary journeys and deploy staff more intelligently based upon their location.
This also helps in plotting out schedules for staff such as district nurses. In conducting care visits, it makes sense to reduce travel times between tasks, helping to improve efficiency and complete more visits in a single shift.
Be agile in the face of change
Navigating a global pandemic has been challenging for all and sundry. With various periods of lockdown, mandatory self-isolation and people contracting Covid-19, assigning tasks and keeping services running has been a case of swimming against the tide at times.
There have been cases at airports where entire security and baggage handling teams have been taken out, and Northern Rail had to cancel services when too many staff members were forced into isolation. These have been exceptional times, but it is possible to navigate them effectively.
With a single view of the workforce, it makes it easier to manoeuvre people and keep services running. If the worst does happen, it at least facilitates swift decision making and clear communications with end users of your services. Without a central view and the help of automation, scheduling in times of stress is time intensive and manual at best; guesswork at worst.
Plug your scheduling into your wider organisation
Scheduling is vital for every company. In managing a large workforce, it is even more important, especially where vital infrastructure and healthcare services are concerned. Having robust oversight of your scheduling links closely to your efforts to deliver services and projects, recruit new staff, train existing employees and keep on top of your competency management.
It also helps in monitoring and reporting on objectives and outcomes. If projects have overrun or performed well, having a holistic view of who managed and worked on them is vital in garnering understanding that can inform future tasks.
Fundamentally, however, scheduling is central to the very core activities of any business. Leaving it to chance, guesswork and human error is a risky process. The tools exist to enhance your scheduling, by equipping your administrative teams with the tools to help them make swift, informed and effective decisions. Without the need to manually trawl through records, it leaves them free to focus on exceptions and improvements, in turn helping to move your organisation forward.
CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business, which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.
Competency management may sound like a basic construct in the world of safety-critical work. Employees are hired, they prove that they are appropriately trained and qualified for their role and off you go. Being qualified and competent at the commencement of a role is only one aspect of competency management; a robust framework is required to ensure that all staff receive ongoing support, assessments, training and guidance for their tasks. Complying with safety protocols depends upon it.
Understanding your workforce
Having a central record and database of your workforce enables you to keep track of who is competent at what. In times of strain, for example where there might be a number of absentees at short notice (something we’ve seen regularly during the Covid pandemic with people having to self-isolate), it is crucial that you can be nimble in assigning tasks across your workforce to keep services running and projects on track.
A single view of competencies required for tasks and competencies across your workforce facilitates flexible decision making. Staff can be reassigned across your organisation, safe in the knowledge that they are appropriately skilled and competent for the task at hand, whilst remaining compliant with health and safety regulations applicable to the organisation. An easily accessible record of hours staff have worked, for example, must be maintained. Fatigue is a major cause of accidents in the rail sector and can affect staff competencies to perform their tasks. Jobs should not be allocated to staff when they have not had the required amount of rest or they will exceed a safe number of hours to work.
Central record keeping is also useful for identifying skills gaps. Where such gaps are identified, this can trigger a workflow regarding training of staff in your existing workforce and can be linked to your organisation’s recruitment efforts. This further helps to ensure that your workforce has adequate competencies to fulfil the tasks across your organisation.
Safety first
In safety critical environments, competency management can be particularly important in order to comply with safety regulations. It is vital that your workforce is regularly assessed and observed, and that where ongoing training for a role is required, it is delivered, attended and passed.
For example first aider certificates last for three years, although the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommend that refresher training is conducted annually. Most working environments require the presence of trained first aiders, so it is important that administrators ensure that there are sufficiently competent personnel to perform the role.
In more safety intensive environments, for example trackside work on the rail network, it is vital that all members of the workforce receive appropriate safety training and briefings to understand their equipment and environment on an ongoing basis.
Ensuring that safety briefings are delivered is crucial and then, when incidents do occur, so is the recording of them, including near misses. With a log of all activities, from briefings to incidents, it makes it much easier to gain a full view of workforce safety and to understand why incidents have occurred. This can then trigger follow-up activities such as observations, assessments and the implementation of remedial training where necessary.
Upskilling your workforce’s competencies
Having a central log of information also makes life easier for your workforce to understand their training and assessment obligations, whilst also opening up and suggesting new training opportunities to them. This helps them with their career development and helps you with broadening the competencies available to you across your organisation.
Ongoing training is a prerequisite in some roles, so using a supporting competency management software tool can help you with auto-allocation of mandatory courses and sending notifications to staff members of training opportunities relevant to them.
Where potential skills gaps are identified, you can recommend relevant courses to your workforce to encourage them to broaden their competencies, making your workforce more flexible and agile in the face of unforeseen shortfalls in staff numbers. This feeds directly into responding to short-term incidents such as self-isolation arising from Covid by equipping you with the knowledge of your workforce that facilitates quick fixes where they are necessary.
A bird’s eye view
With all competencies across your workforce logged, it is much easier to allocate relevant tasks to people in a timely and even automated fashion. A bird’s eye view of your entire workforce makes decision making much easier.
The deployment of the correct technology is crucial to this. Moving away from manually intensive processes such as spreadsheets and phone calls, to having all the relevant information made available to the relevant decision makers in an automated fashion creates great efficiencies in your competency management processes, making it simple to understand who is competent at what.
This carries over benefits to your scheduling, training and, crucially, safety protocols. It’s one thing having appropriately competent staff members when they join your organisation, but updating and upskilling their core competencies keeps your entire organisation on track in a more harmonious manner.
Having a central log of all activities and incidents also makes it much easier to schedule the necessary assessments and observations of your workforce. This central log also makes it easier to identify trends and understand why incidents occur.
Ultimately, keeping your workforce appropriately trained and competent for the tasks which they are assigned to undertake carries huge benefits to your safety efforts. If staff are being assigned to tasks for which they are not appropriately competent, accidents are more likely to occur. Having a clear evidence base and bird’s eye view of your entire workforce helps to comply with safety protocols and keep your projects moving.
Birmingham City Council has more than 400 schools in its area and made the decision in August 2019 to deploy IMPULSE Nexus from CACI to support its school admissions process. To date, Birmingham City Council has used IMPULSE Nexus to administer school admissions across all its schools, helping it to maintain a fair and transparent process that handles this delicate process with care, accuracy and flexibility.
IMPULSE Nexus has also supported the schools across Birmingham City Council with in-year admissions, allocating spaces to children who need to move between schools during the school year. “The system is a major step forward,” said one school portal user during a recent Birmingham City Council IMPULSE Nexus user group meeting. “We need the data to be correct at both ends due to the transiency of some pupils and IMPULSE Nexus has ensured that we always have instant access to accurate data.”
“We can get distances to schools instantly”
An important factor in determining school allocations is a child’s domestic location and how far they are from the school being applied to. IMPULSE Nexus automates this part of the process for the school admissions process, making it easier for administrators to make swift decisions based upon this metric. “It’s a lot quicker to get people on the waiting list and we can get distances to schools instantly, which is really useful for our admissions processes,” commented another school admissions administrator.
“Having the distances so quickly and easily is great – we know immediately who the closest person to a school is,” added another.
The school portal within IMPULSE Nexus acts as a central record from which all information on a child and school can be viewed. This means that administrators can easily access relevant information, such as distances and the local school rankings. “The school portal is a major step forward for us, it’s great to be able to see data in real time in there,” says one user of IMPULSE Nexus within Birmingham City Council’s network of schools. “It makes it really straightforward to manage the process and it’s easy to see where your students are.”
Communication made simple
IMPULSE Nexus has also made communication easier between the schools, admissions teams and Birmingham City Council professionals. Not only can communication be automated via the use of templates within the system, the need for email communications has been reduced as administrators and admissions teams can find the information they need themselves within IMPULSE Nexus. “Having distances available automatically is great, as is the ability to download rankings spreadsheets instantly,” says another. “I like the speed of everything, I’m contacting the admissions teams more infrequently which cuts out unnecessary emails and calls. The school, overall, is emailing the local authority a lot less now, as the data is available in real time and the speed of access is really good.”
Another benefit unlocked within Birmingham City Council has been the ability to rank schools in the area, with IMPULSE Nexus linking directly to the schools ranking system. “It’s a really useful piece of functionality,” said one administrator. “IMPULSE Nexus links directly to the ranking system, which makes allocating places easier. We can import and export relevant data automatically, too, which saves a lot of time in requesting and sending information.”
Overall, IMPULE Nexus is helping the schools, administrators and professionals across Birmingham City Council to more efficiently, accurately and easily manage the schools admission process for the children in the area.
Automation
Moving away from a manual process makes the whole school admissions process far smoother. Without the need to rely on data input and sifting through spreadsheets for information, decisions can be made much quicker, more accurately and more independently. Resolution of appeals is made simple with a reliable data trail of decisions and why they were reached. In year admissions can be handled swiftly by easily identifying which schools have places available and adding children to waiting lists can be done instantly.
By further linking your admissions process to aspects such as school rankings, distances travelled and each child’s personal journey, swifter, fairer and more transparent decisions can be reached. “The reduction in the manual process has been great,” concluded one administrator. “Having so much in-depth information available to us, with the ability to share data instantly, makes the whole process so much easier.”
Scheduling your workforce goes beyond simply ensuring that tasks are being performed by certain members of staff. Of course, fulfilling tasks is a minimum requirement, but having a holistic view of your workforce, its specific skills, competencies and experience can help you to drive deeper understanding. It is also critical in understanding hours worked, where further training is required and in giving management relevant information on each staff member.
This links back to workforce safety, too. Simply by understanding hours worked and hours planned, makes it much easier to comply with fatigue management protocols for workers in safety critical environments. With real time information from out in the field recorded into a single system, overtime and over-running tasks can also be considered as and when they occur and dealt with accordingly. This includes communicating delays in good time and understanding the workforce implications on overlapping and future tasks.
Responding to short term changes
With a central pool of information to call upon, schedulers can begin to automate swathes of their scheduling, with a rules engine matching staff members to tasks based upon specific criteria. This allows scheduling and administrative teams time to focus on more cumbersome areas such as exceptions and reacting to short-term changes in the workforce.
Short-term changes have been brought sharply into focus by the Covid pandemic, with the need for people to self-isolate upon coming into close contact with anyone who has contracted the illness, or having to isolate upon receipt of notification from the NHS app. This has led to scenarios where entire teams have been out of action; something of a challenge in scheduling staff and meeting deadlines.
This was brought into focus for Northern Rail, which experienced a number of positive Covid tests across its workforce, with other colleagues having to isolate as a result of contact with them. The company had to issue a warning to passengers that services would be disrupted.
With a holistic view of your workforce, it’s much easier to see who is available to step into a role, based on their experience, qualifications and other tasks they are expected to perform. This helps to create a more fluid and efficient scheduling system that also enables you to put safety front and centre of the whole process.
It also helps to understand who has been in contact with whom, which can further help with workforce safety regarding Covid. If necessary, like Northern Rail, having a complete understanding of the workforce enables swift decision making as regards the need to amend timetables and cancel services. Having flexibility in such times is crucial to being able to make the right decision for the safety of the workforce and the smooth running of services.
Who can fill in where?
Competency management also has a big role to play here, in tandem with scheduling. It enables schedulers, where necessary, to consider personnel from other areas of the organisation who might be able to help with other tasks. Having the support of a system with a holistic view of your workforce also removes the element of human error in assigning tasks to other people.
This rounded view of competencies and skills can also facilitate the reintegration of staff members who have been isolating or have been off work. Where a colleague has stepped in to cover their tasks, they can be reassigned to other teams. Their return to work can be planned in, ensuring that appropriate protocols have been accounted for and that they’ve supplied things such as a negative Covid test before returning to work.
Rostering solutions to help
In these highly complex and fluid scenarios, a robust rostering solution is paramount in order to keep projects moving and to maintain workforce safety, with the need to be able to adapt at short notice and make best use of available staffing resources.
The deployment of a rostering solution facilitates the central recording and all-encompassing view of the entire workforce. With aspects such as auto-scheduling and auto-allocation of tasks, it frees up schedulers’ time to work on exceptions and deal with issues as and when they arise. As we’ve seen, it helps to be in a strong position to react to unforeseen circumstances.
CACI’s Cygnum software is designed to do all of this. We help transport operators to schedule their workforce and understand their resources, bringing scheduling, training and competency management together in one place. This helps to not only schedule and understand workforce patterns, but to implement training and move staff around to fulfil tasks as necessary.
Our white paper on improving workforce safety in the rail industry further explores the ways in which technology can help organisations to maximise workforce efficiency whilst implementing high safety standards. It is free to view here.
In September, the Additional Learning Needs (ALN) code went live across Wales. The ALN code replaces the Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) framework that will continue to function across England. The change is being made in order to bring support networks and resources together and improve outcomes for children and young people with identified additional learning needs.
Obviously, one of the major changes is in the wording. Special educational needs replace additional learning needs; therefore, SENCOs will become ALNCOs. The changes, however, are more than just linguistic and will involve significant changes in thinking about process and practice.
At present, any child or young person recognised as having SEN is given an individual education plan (IEP). These are being phased out in Wales, to be replaced by an individual development plan (IDP). IEPs stop when a young person finishes school; IDPs will carry on if the young person attends higher or further education, covering their entire education journey from 0-25.
ALN will further cover children and young people who have learning difficulties and disabilities (LDD), bringing LDD and SEN together in a single code.
Highlights
Covers each young person with ALN from 0-25
Merges SEN and LDD
IDPs to replace IEPs
About the IDP
IDPs are structured to include minimum standards that must be adhered to by every school and local authority:
A record of the child’s identified, developing and changing needs
Required additional provisions for each child
A timely, current action plan and agreed outcomes for each child
How each element of progress is and will be measured
Information that enables accountability which is legally enforceable
Review dates to measure actions, tasks and outcomes
Ensuring that IDPs work efficiently and effectively will require services to collaborate to ensure that children recognised with ALN receive the support that they need to achieve the stated goals. This co-ordination between schools, colleges, other providers and local authority services will require a greater degree of flexibility in receiving and transferring holistic case records and data seamlessly.
It will also require more robust data capture, entry and checking to ensure that all contributions have been considered and the information is current, accurate and relevant within a child’s IDP. This is vital given that the IDP is an accountable and legally enforceable document. In sharing and collaborating on such important documents, their security and management is also paramount, containing as they will vast quantities of sensitive personal data.
Children, parents, outcomes
The collaboration goes beyond just working with other authorities and schools as the child or young people move schools or move location. There also needs to be full engagement with, and the provision of, information and appropriate advice to the families and young people. Again, the information needs to be shared seamlessly in a secure and timely fashion to enable families, children and young people to input into their journey and opportunities as appropriate.
The success of the ALN code will depend on this sharing of specific information about meeting needs, so it’s important for schools, colleges, other providers and authorities to consider new ways in how they will address the challenges and include the views of young people, parents and carers in the process, and the necessary adaptations to their service.
The role of technology
With all the relevant information stored electronically, amending, updating, transferring and receiving case records and IDPs will be performed using synchronised common structured data via a central hub system. The easiest way to open the entire process to the multi professional eco system in a secure fashion is via dedicated portals; one each for parents/carers, schools/colleges, local authorities and professionals. This enables everyone who needs to contribute to the process to have self-service tailored access and visibility so they can more easily make their contributions.
Maintaining a single, uniquely structured ALN case record enables schools, colleges and authorities to use the holistic view of each child to establish effective support. They can operationally establish things like reminders so that they can review and assess each case in good time and strategically use the structured data to understand and better respond to patterns of unmet need in different groups.
Having a well-structured central record then plays into the accountable and legally enforceable element of the IDP, since a transparent record of all chronological activity within the IDP will be available on demand. Furthermore, where a child moves school or placement, or a young person goes to college or university, their IDP can be simply passed to prospective institutions at which they will be continuing their education. These institutions will have a full record of prospective students, enabling them to plan and facilitate offers for their joining in good time, increasing the opportunity and likelihood of meeting stated outcomes.
Security
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) necessitates robust handling of data such as IDPs and information surrounding young people. How does your school or authority store its data?
Working with a technology partner that can assist you with data hosting solutions is one option, since outsourcing hosting is one way of staying compliant with GDPR and means that you are storing data with a trusted partner. This means that you can store your data with the flexibility you need, on premise or in cloud, to give your teams real-time access to your data.
Aspects such as backups and downtime also need to be considered alongside security – if there’s a system outage, how long can you afford to be without your data and how much can you afford to lose? Scalable solutions offer greater flexibility in managing, storing and securing your data as well as working with a growing user population involved in the meeting of ALN support needs over many years.
Improving outcomes
Fundamentally, however, you need a technology solution and a technology partner that can empower your authority and the staff in schools, colleges and other providers in the education support eco system to achieve the fundamental objective of the ALN code – improving outcomes for children and young people with recognised ALN.
CACI’s IMPULSE Nexus software is being used by several Welsh councils to support this underlying objective, whilst also helping them to comply with data and security regulations by offering a fully managed hosting service. This helps to take the uncertainties out of data storage and management alongside providing an information management solution that facilitates the seamless recording, transfer and receiving of holistic case records and data with improved engagement and contribution from the people around the child.
IMPULSE Nexus fully supports the ALN code by operating a uniquely structured and synchronised common central hub case record and IDP with associated identification and support information. Further, the dedicated IMPUSE Nexus portals provide schools/colleges, parents/carers, professional and local authority staff a direct, relevant and focused online experience to collaborate on delivering the centralised IDP, with a fully auditable and transparent record of activity. This creates greater collaboration between professionals, providers and authorities, helping to realise the purpose of the ALN code in delivering better outcomes for children and young people.
If you would like any further information on how IMPULSE Nexus and how CACI’s dedicated team can support you with the implementation and future success of the ALN code in Wales, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/products/product/impulse-nexus
Fatigue management protocols are commonplace in labour intensive industries which require prolonged periods of physical or mental exertion. If you’ve got engineers or drivers keeping services moving, their working hours need to be carefully monitored in order to ensure that they don’t become fatigued, thereby impairing their ability to perform to the best of their abilities. Providing appropriate rest breaks during shifts and ensuring that they get enough time to rest in between is paramount. So, how can management teams effectively manage this process and ensure that workers are getting enough rest and adhering to your company’s fatigue management protocols?
The role of management
The role of management is fundamental to ensuring that fatigue management procedures are in place, first and foremost. There are usually industry standard guidelines depending upon your sector, for example the number of hours a train driver can consecutively drive for, or be on a shift for, is closely monitored to best ensure that they are in good condition to drive.
More broadly, where safety critical work is being conducted, there is a requirement that there be a 12-hour break between one shift ending and the next one beginning.
Putting these procedures in place is one thing. Enforcing them, however, is another.
The role of technology
Technology can make the process of establishing and adhering to fatigue management protocols much easier for management teams. If your workforce can sign into and out of shifts via their mobile device, then real-time, archivable records can be kept with notifications established where infringements occur.
This enables management teams to better understand the shifts undertaken by the workforce and to take action where required.
Furthermore, by linking your fatigue management protocols to your workforce management structure, you can understand the circumstances of each worker to better combat fatigue. For example, you could link a team member’s domestic address to their shifts, better understanding their travel commitments to get to and from the location of work.
This may not sound important, but Renown Consultants were fined £450,000 by The Office of Road and Rail, with £300,000 in costs, after two of its workers were killed in a road traffic accident on the way home from a shift. Fatigue management protocols had not been adhered to and the two workers had to travel a significant enough distance home for this to prove fatal.
A holistic view
Understanding your workforce and the shift patterns of your workers is crucial to implementing an effective and robust fatigue management framework. Deploying all the information available to you and considering all the aspects will also help in implementing and maintaining your protocols.
Setting shift patterns and rosters is one thing, but then monitoring how they are conducted is another. Receiving real-time data from out in the field gives you a plethora of information.
Not only will it reveal how many hours are being worked, but it will also offer performance indicators where projects are concerned. For example, a set number of hours will be assigned to complete a given task – if this timeline is not met, understanding why is important.
Your fatigue management protocols can plug in to and interact with the rest of your processes in this way, which can help in revealing strengths and weaknesses in your processes to inform other decisions. You will also be able to identify where work is unlikely to be completed within the allocated time, in advance. All the while, you will be able to enhance the safety of your workforce.
Cutting corners with workforce safety is unacceptable and fatigue management is a central component of that. Understanding your workforce’s shift patterns and linking them to their external circumstances can play a fundamental role in ensuring that you have a robust and manageable fatigue management framework in place.
