Team: Children’s Quality Assurance, Relational Practice directorate and Data Performance Team, Corporate services

Main Submission:

In 2023, the CSSW Performance App (a Power BI application) with a range of dashboards for Camden children’s social work service was developed. The application gives colleagues across the service instant access to key service data, trends, as well as flagging due and upcoming tasks.

To support the launch of the dashboards, demo & training sessions, as well as user documentation, were rolled out to familiarise colleagues with the new tools.

Since the initial application launch work has continued to increase the scope of service data covered, including a Fostering and Quality Assurance dashboard.

Data hub
A ‘one-stop shop’ for all things data within Camden children’s services. The hub provides access to essential data resources including; links to various data applications, performance reports, data insights and analyses, benchmarking, guidance and the latest data news announcements, along with options to request data insights and new features, as well as access to data applications.

Centralized Data Access
The Children’s Services Data Hub consolidates data from diverse sources (e.g., education, Early Help and social services), serving as a single reliable data and information gateway.

Improved Onboarding for New Workers
The data hub provides a central repository of tools and information, making it easier for new workers to find and access the resources needed for their work. Access to Power BI applications is managed centrally via the hub, with licensing, DBS and appropriate access checks handled by the Data Analysis team, giving a seamless experience for users.

Improved efficiency
Instant access data via the CSSW Performance App and centralised information access via the Data Hub reduce administrative burden, improving efficiency and freeing up practitioners to spend more time working with children, young people and families to achieve positive outcomes.

Alignment with CSC National Framework
These tools embed data within operations and practice and align with the CSC National Framework enabler workforce is equipped and effective.

Scale of usage
The CSSW Performance App and other dashboards are well utilised with over 31,000 views in the most recent 3 month period by 170 users

Actionable Insights and embedding data in practice
The CSSW Performance App and other dashboards facilitate effective support for children, young people, and their families by providing practitioners additional insight into which clients may require further focus, turning data into prioritised intervention and support.

This maturity of data management, its accessibility and depth facilitate a robust and curious approach to practice. This in turn enables hypotheses to be drawn and then analysed and explored which go on to help practitioners, managers and senior leaders to understand “the story behind the numbers”.

By understanding that story, we create needs led services and resources. We can see impact and celebrate success for the children and young people of Camden and their families, as well as quickly grip any areas that may need further attention.

We are able to see and manage trends clearly and this helps us understand what is happening for children and young people and understand how they are experiencing our interventions. All of the above add to our learning experiences and are key enablers and a clear line of sight to practice wisdom, developing our learning offer and therefore enhancing the quality of services received by children, young people and their families.

Good examples of this are how we use our data approaches to focus our auditing and other quality assurance activity, which in turn then garners feedback from children and young people and their carers directly about those specific practice areas. The flexibility inherent in the data systems enables us to create, amend and / or refocus as needs emerge and as National and local contexts change.

This means that the children and families of Camden are always served well with a forward planning and thinking, self-aware and responsive Children’s Services. We are also in the process of designing a disproportionality dashboard, across all services, including Early Help and the Youth Justice Service. This will enable a meta perspective, and ability to consider key areas of focus for innovation to stymy structural inequalities.

Team: SEND and Curriculum Inclusion, The ECASS Team- (Enfield Communication Advisory Support Service)

Partners: Caroline McCallum, Speech and Language Therapist – Founder of NHSVerbo, Henrietta McLachlan, Speech and Language Therapist – Founder of ELKLAN

Main Submission:

The Enfield Communication Advisory Support Service (ECASS) is a Local Authority (LA) speech and language initiative that has successfully addressed the provision gap for Children and Young People (CYP) with speech, language, and communication needs (SLCN) who were unable to have their needs met by the existing Health offer which only provided speech and language provision for those with an Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP). This gap in the local offer has led to the high number of Education Health and Care Needs Assessment (EHCNA) requests for CYP with SLCN which makes up approximately 37% of all Enfield EHCPs. The ECASS initiative is effectively narrowing this gap, providing much-needed support to these CYP at SEN support.

The ECASS initiative has fostered a spirit of collaboration within the LA, enabling flexibility in commissioning health and in-house multi-agency colleagues. The service includes Speech and Language Therapists, Occupational Therapists, Educational Psychologists, and Specialist Advisory Teachers. Together, this multidisciplinary team delivers a flexible service to meet the community’s needs while utilising assistive technology to enhance their capacity, making ECASS a cost-efficient SEN Support model. This collaborative approach is key to the success of the initiative.

Fundamental to Enfield’s Local Area key improvement priority, the ECASS approach aims to provide an equitable universal, targeted, and specialist offer which empowers the education workforce with the confidence, knowledge, and self-sufficiency to deliver high-quality teaching to all children and young people. The positive impact of the ECASS initiative on the education workforce is inspiring and has motivated local area partnerships to further collaborate their efforts in this direction.

Enfield’s SEND Partnership are striving to overcome the following exceptional challenges:

• A significant increase in demand for EHCNA, compared to statistical neighbouring boroughs

• A national shortage of speech and language therapists

• A gap in the universal and statutory offer

• An increase in the high-needs financial deficit

• Over-commissioning outside the health contract to meet needs with private therapists

• A lack of both rigor and a coordinated approach in the range of private therapists attempting to meet the needs of Enfield’s children.

A record-high number of CYP (1.9 million) are recorded to have speech and language challenges nationally. If left unsupported, they may face a lifetime of struggle and exclusion. Research led by Speech and Language UK indicates that, without the proper support, these children with SLCN are up to 11 times more likely to be behind in key subjects at school and twice as likely to be unemployed as young adults. This community of CYP in Enfield makes up more than half of mental health service referrals and two-thirds of the young offender population.

Enfield’s ambition is to make every school a communication-friendly school with the skills and resources available to meet the needs of CYP with various speech, language, and communication differences. This includes utilising technological initiatives such as NHSVerbo, a virtual speech and language toolkit which has added capacity to the ECASS team. This has enabled school staff who are already well-placed in settings to continue accessing speech and language strategies through a virtual toolkit, freeing up therapists to focus on providing specialist support which only a therapist can provide; thereby extending the range of specialist resources and provision available. This has enabled the ECASS team to hold a higher caseload and target more direct therapy support to more specialist cases.

To achieve the Enfield ambition, the ECASS team has worked in close partnership with Elklan and NHSVerbo. This collaboration has brought schools an offer that focuses on education workforce development and offers parent/carer-focused training and support to build on strategies taught in school with confidence. Elklan, is a nationally recognised training programme designed to support children’s communication, language, and speech in the classroom which is being delivered as a programme of study to every Enfield school. This partnership ensures that all CYP with SLCN receive the high-quality education they deserve. Members of the ECASS team have also been involved in the national review and coproduction of Elklan training materials for the courses they hold licenses to deliver.

Before investing in Verbo, the Enfield offer did not include speech and language screening or assessment for CYP without an EHCP. Verbo, on average, reaches 48 SEN Support children in each target school, now totalling 580 CYP across 12 Enfield pilot schools. As a result, this has enabled therapists to offer statutory provision to 388 additional pupils across these schools, narrowing the growing statutory provision gap and further reducing the need for commissioning private therapists to meet the needs of these children and young people. This has resulted in a significant cost saving of £556,743 this year. Schools supported by the ECASS team have also seen a 60% decrease in EHCNA requests, as children’s needs are being better met through high quality teaching strategies. This has avoided premature escalation to more specialist pathways, resulting in a further cost savings of £487,500 per academic year. This makes ECASS’ cost saving to Enfield’s high need’s deficit a total of £1,044,243.21 for the academic year 2023-2024.

In addition to the positive impact the service has made on Enfield’s high needs deficit, the service has also had an impact on Enfield’s educational outcomes. 95% of schools supported by ECASS achieved the national average score in the KS1 phonics screening, compared to 66% of non-ECASS-supported schools, and 74% of ECASS-supported schools achieved the London average score, compared to 53% of non-ECASS-supported schools. Further to this, the impact ECASS in Enfield has summoned interest both nationally and internationally. Three neighbouring London boroughs have expressed an interest in learning more about the ECASS offer and how this can be modelled within their respective communities. Nationally, ECASS have extended their reach in sharing their practice with the University of Ghana, as part of the university’s speech and language therapy training programme for therapy students.

ECASS is utilising current resources through innovative delivery to meet demand now and in the future. Every Enfield school will have access to a speech and language therapist to support them in delivering targeted provision to those with the greatest need. In contrast, using VERBO and a multidisciplinary SEN support team such as ECASS, can help schools implement universal support effectively, appropriately streamlining the Assess Plan Do Review (APDR) process. In this way, children who experience speech and language challenges will have the best opportunity to overcome learning barriers, progress towards their educational outcomes and achieve their aspirations and goals.

The service has developed a whole-school communication approach, which is enabling schools and settings to identify speech, language, and communication differences early to provide the proper support in the right place at the right time. The 2023 Local Area SEND inspection recognised the service for maximising the communication and education outcomes for CYP with SLCN. As quoted by Ofsted:

“The needs of CYP with SEND are typically identified promptly. For example, the Enfield Communication Advisory Support Service (ECASS) provides school settings with a whole-school communication approach to aid early intervention and train education staff. This ensures that children’s speech, language, and communication needs are identified and met promptly.”

CYP are at the heart of the speech and language offered in school and at home. CYP have made significant progress in their targets, and families have informed us that they feel more confident meeting their children’s and young people’s needs. Our schools are highly supportive of the offer. They have found that their staff are more skilled in identifying needs and feel confident supporting children without escalating to statutory support.

Feedback from an ECASS setting:

“The input we have had from ECASS has been relevant and personalised to our setting. Staff have received training on areas of SEN that are often forgotten, and this has allowed the school to upskill staff whilst gaining a broad understanding of the varied presentations of speech, language and communication difficulties. Erin has been a great sounding board and has provided excellent advice. She has taken the time to get to know our school and understand the needs of our students. The Latymer has hugely benefited from being an ECASS target school and the input we have received has been far-reaching, impacting students, curriculum, and environment.”

Supporting Information:

For direct quotes from schools, children, young people and families we have worked with, please see our ECASS Annual Report link

Page 17-22- Feedback from Education Workforce
Page 26 – Parent feedback
Page 28- Child/Young Person feedback

Team: Business Intelligence

Main Submission:

Introduction
Hammersmith and Fulham’s (H&F) children’s (CHS) BI team are committed to providing the best-in-class performance and data reporting for CHS services. Working collaboratively and closely with both the service and the IT Mosaic Systems Team, the aim was to develop new reporting mechanisms that are dynamic in design, accessible, understandable and visually impactful and is tailored to service needs. CHS BI’s ambition, as corporate team, was to create new interactive reports and dashboards and to make full use of infographics to enable senior leaders, operational managers and practitioners to understand data and their performance quickly and effectively. By designing and implementing a new performance management framework (PMF), it has allowed the service to identify and celebrate areas that are working well whilst reporting is used to identifying, pre-empt and improve areas of risk to ensure successful outcomes and services are delivered to children and their families.

Motivations and Objectives
Since early 2020, only a small number of reports were available to Children Social Care (CSC). The Ofsted inspection in 2019 highlighted ‘the availability of robust performance data’ as an area that required improvement. Led by senior leaders and fostering a collaborative approach, collectively, H&F ensured all new reports developed provided the best insight and intelligence required to allow managers and practitioners to monitor effectively all children they are working with as they become known to and progress through the service, This includes the front door, through to CP, looked after, all the way to the care leavers service. Microsoft Power BI and the Council’s new corporate data warehouse were fully utilised. As a result, the CHS PMF comprises of several reporting pillars:

• Quarterly Executive high level performance infographic covering performance and activity, at high level, across the whole of Children’s services.
• Weekly report designed as a performance on a page summary looking at performance and activity over the last week.
• Monthly infographic report summarising H&F performance and activity for the last month and year to date. Benchmarking data including the latest National, statistical neighbour and inner London averages (where available) are included. Graphics and charts are used to make data accessible and easy to understand (presented at monthly leadership meetings).
• Quarterly report looks at performance and activity in detail over the last 12- months from front door through to care leavers. All performance and activity are benchmarked (where possible) against the national, statistical and the inner London average. A concise narrative on performance is provided.
• Annual report is produced at year end and looks at the activity and performance submitted as part of the DfE statutory returns. Final figures published by the department are used and a comprehensive narrative is provided.
• Data analysis making use of the ChAT to look at data and quality, as well as making use of the LIIA quarterly benchmarking reports. The latter is analysed to show how H&F’s performance in the quarter compares to the rest of London. A concise three-page infographic summary report is produced by CHS BI.
• A comprehensive suite of 41 Power BI dashboards (created as separate apps) for the service to access and use and covers the depth and breadth of statutory and internal performance reporting

Actions and activities
This has been a transformational programme of work that started in August 2020. A comprehensive gap analysis was carried out to ensure system workflows were fit for purpose whilst new processes were built into Mosaic to allow for robust recording. Regular fortnightly, weekly and sometimes daily meetings took place to ensure momentum continued and all tasks was delivered at pace. Any issues/problems identified were discussed and addressed promptly by a cross-working group comprised of the CHS Head of Performance and Improvement and the Leads from the Mosaic System’s and CHS BI Service. Monthly Practice Board meetings that focus on individual service areas within CSC as well as quarterly Performance Learning Boards (PLB) chaired by the Executive Director for People ensured buy in from the onset. The board allowed CHS BI to provide rolling updates on progress, timescales and actions.

Impact of the new performance reporting
Since the implementation of the CHS PMF, the service has seen a huge cultural shift. This has involved practitioners moving away from manual based recording and sometimes bespoke monitoring systems to fully embracing new digital reports and dashboards. This has resulted in:

• Increased transparency, ownership and accountability across the service.
• Improved decision making and timely intervention and monitoring to safeguard children and young people.
• Early identification of performance areas of concern or risk resulted in timely targeted attention.
• Easy tracking of performance and activity over time.
• Freeing up practitioner’s time to concentrate on social work duties.
• Greater understanding of data, performance and being able to see the trends and patterns of children known to the service. This was achieved by developing effective dashboards and reports that are easy-to-follow and accessible to all.
• Since the implementation of the CHS PMF, H&F has seen an increase in children and families having their assessments completed on time. From 2015 to 2020, H&F’s yearly performance averaged 74.0%. Since 2021, the average yearly performance has increased to 94.4%.
• There has been improved monitoring and tracking of care experienced young people who are at risk of NEET whilst the health of all care for children are closely monitored
• Minimised gaps in data recording due to the tightening up of system processes. This has led to improved targeted decision-making processes for children know the service.

Conclusion
The implementation of the CHS PMF has been an incredibly successful and during the inspection this year, Ofsted commented that H&F’s ‘Performance data is both powerful and reassuring’. The PMF has forged a new way of thinking on how reports should be designed. This is to allow practitioners to easily visualise the trends and numbers of children they are providing services too whilst the same reports are utilised to monitor and ensure those same children are receiving the best support and care from H&F.

Team: Havering Youth Wellbeing Census “Virtual Team”

Partners: UCL Partners, North East London NHS Foundation Trust (NELFT), Havering Place Based Partnership, Havering secondary schools.

Main Submission:

Introduction
Nationally, there is growing concern about mental health and wellbeing in children and adolescents. In 2017, one in nine children aged 5-16 were identified as having a probable mental health problem. By July 2021, this figure had increased to one in six (five in every classroom of 30).

Locally, Havering has seen a similar trend, exacerbated by the pandemic. Contacts to our MASH concerning children’s mental health increased by more than 50% compared with pre-pandemic figures. Data for Education, Health and Care Plans shows that proportionately, the greatest increase has been in Social, Emotional and Mental Health needs. Alongside this, between censuses, Havering had one of the fastest growing child populations nationally. Engaging with our young residents, and their mental health, have become key priorities for our integrated care system.

The Havering Youth Wellbeing Census is designed to improve our understanding of wellbeing in adolescents and the action we can take together in response, using the locally adapted #BeeWell survey. It aims to use data to amplify the voice of young people in our borough and empower them to lead change that will benefit them and their peers.

The core #BeeWell survey was developed as part of the #BeeWell programme, an initiative originating in Greater Manchester, combining academic expertise with youth leadership to make the wellbeing of young people everybody’s business. The core survey explores the domains of wellbeing (themes include: ‘emotions’; ‘meaning, purpose and control’; and ‘understanding yourself’) and ‘what drives wellbeing’ (e.g. health and routines, hobbies and entertainment, relationships).

In addition to the core survey questions, questions to address local needs as voiced by local young people and the organisations and services that support them were used for the Havering Youth Wellbeing Census.

Delivery
Implementing the census has required collaborative working across multiple Council departments (Starting Well, Public Health, Insight, and Communications and Engagement) and our partners, including local secondary schools and our 0-19 service provider.

As well as working together, we pooled budgets to meet the implementation costs, with 50% funding coming from the Local Authority and our provider, and match funding from the Integrated Care Board.

A key objective was putting young people at the centre of this initiative from the offset. After recruiting four pathfinder schools, our delivery partner (UCLPartners) facilitated workshops with pupils to explore what wellbeing meant to them.

Themes were cross-referenced against the core #BeeWell questions, identifying possible new areas for inclusion. This led to new questions being added on:

• Climate change
• Vaping
• Crime
• Accessing support
• Travel to school
• Schoolwork related stress

A Questionnaire Advisory Group, with a young person and local stakeholder representation, agreed the final measures for inclusion.

The census was delivered digitally in schools, as a lesson, with teachers provided with resources to support delivery. These included details of local and national services that support different aspects of young people’s mental wellbeing.

Survey responses were combined with data held by the council, allowing analysis of responses according to academic year group, sex, free school meal eligibility and special educational needs.

Each participating school received an interactive report that set out their pupils’ results against those of all pupils, identifying areas of relative strength, as well as opportunities for improvement. Schools were supported to understand their results through meetings with consultants from the Child Outcomes Research Consortium.

A neighbourhood dashboard was published on our Data Hub, allowing anyone to view the results across the borough, the three geographic localities, and by demographic.

We secured funding for a Youth Worker to do further engagement with young people to facilitate youth-led change in response to the census. A key challenge has been recruitment to this post, meaning we have had to review our approach.

The original approach involved setting up a new Youth Wellbeing Steering Group, meeting in a community venue. Our new approach utilises existing Wellbeing Groups in schools. This has the benefit of engaging a wider group of young people and reducing the time needed to recruit them. Once the dedicated post is recruited to, the postholder will work with young people in schools (with support from school staff) to identify their wellbeing priorities and recommendations for action. Funding has also been allocated for young people to commission small projects to support improved wellbeing.

Our Mental Health Support Teams have also been invaluable with this initiative, using schools’ individual reports to tailor their work with young people to identify areas for prioritisation or further exploration, whilst also using the insight to tailor their own offer to students.

Impact and feedback
The census was completed in 10 schools, by 2,287 pupils, representing 36% of this age group. This provides an invaluable, first of its kind, local evidence base, which is supporting multiple needs assessments.

Alongside engaging young people, we established a multi-agency task and finish group, which identified priority areas for action based on the results. These are being embedded into existing and developing strategies and plans, including our SEND and AlternativeProvision Strategy, Culture Strategy and Physical Activity Strategy.

The results also heavily feature in, and influenced, our recently adopted Integrated Starting Well Plan: Happy Healthy Lives, which sets out some of the action that is being taken to support young people’s wellbeing.

An on-going external communications campaign is using the results to highlight pertinent issues to residents, including young people themselves, parents and teachers. We have shared infographic summaries on bullying, physical activity, and caring responsibilities, using the results to highlight the under-identification of young carers and raise awareness of the support available.

We are now planning for Wave 2 of the census to be delivered in 2025, which will allow us to identify trends over time and continue our aim of amplifying young people’s voices with data.

To hear colleagues across Havering Council, and staff and students from a participating school discussing their experience of the census, please watch our short video at:

To hear from young people on how they are using the results in their schools, please watch these short videos: