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Case study 1: SWINDON BC Changing families' lives in Swindon By Sue Wald, head of commissioning children and adults, Swindon BC Following a successful pilot to provide targeted support for 20 vulnerable families, Swindon Borough Council wanted to identify more families in need as part of its programme to extend the original pilot. The council had brought all professionals working with young people together into four integrated teams including health visitors, speech and language practitioners, professionals from education welfare, disabled children, social workers, the voluntary sector and children's centres. However, the four teams were all reporting into different IT systems. This meant there was no overall picture of a single child or family. The council wanted to make it easier for these professionals to work more closely together, sharing data so that they could adopt a more joined-up approach to helping a family. If a health worker was looking at a child's file, they wouldn't even know who their social worker was without ringing the relevant team," says Sue Wald, head of commissioning for children and adults. The council decided to roll out a management information system for all staff working with children across the four integrated teams. Professionals could then view and add to a single record of a child. Using this data was the starting point for the identification of families for the Troubled Families Programme. We identified families with a potential high level of vulnerability – these included families meeting the Troubled Families criteria as well as children who had special educational needs, those receiving free school meals and those with lower than expected achievement in school. The most valuable piece of information we uncovered was that some of these families did not have a lead professional allocated to them. Identifying the families is helping us to put the right support in place. Our vision is to deliver appropriate support to all of the 370 families classed as ‘troubled' under the national government initiative to improve lives.Case study 2 Delivering effective early help for children at risk of becoming NEET in Barnsley By Tracey Herbert, system support and training officer, Barnsley MBC Barnsley produced a vulnerability matrix designed to spot young people in the borough whose background and circumstances put them at greater risk of falling out of education, employment or training from 16 years of age. We needed a wide range of data to identify the right young people, including information from schools, details of special educational needs and postcodes as well as any history of teenaged parenthood or involvement in youth offending, Producing the matrix involved various members of staff having to contact different agencies or pulling information in from multiple databases. The job was so huge that it could only be tackled annually. The council started to collate and analyse the wealth of data needed to measure children's vulnerability to ending up not in education, employment or training (NEET). The data involved included details of a child's ethnicity, historical information on their attendance or exclusion from school and whether or not they were in care. Young people who were not expected to make two levels of progress from Key Stage 2 to 3 were among those analysed by the software as well as those who had become teenage parents. We run the software every month and pinpoint those who have the potential to become NEET. We simply wouldn't have the capacity to carry out regular data analysis on that scale without the software. This enables us to liaise with schools more effectively and ensure that even those young people on the borderline of being at risk of becoming NEET are identified and supported. With factors like school attendance changing all the time, the tool enables us to keep a much closer eye on the progress of young people in the area. The council uses the information to help ensure those young people flagged as vulnerable get the help they need – either directly from their schools or through more targeted support delivered by the authority.

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Time for some intervention? case studies

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