By Charlotte Webster-
Children’s social care data is being underutilised at both local and regional levels, at the expense of greater proficiency, a report has warned.
The efficient use of vital childcare data by British Councils is below standard due to financial restrictions.
Several councils in the Uk as a result cannot do more than collating figures for statutory returns, a report has warned. The report by the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory (NJFO), which reviewed a range of other recent studies, noted that numbers submitted by councils to the government, for instance around looked after children numbers, constitute only a small fraction of the data they hold.
The report states that the process of preparation of data for submission to the Department for Education has been ”onerous and time consuming for most local authorities, with the process of
preparing data taking up to three months (local authorities submit data by the end of June”.
The project also highlighted the substantial reduction in the size of many local authority performance management teams as part of austerity measures. Some local authorities reported very limited capacity to carry out statutory reporting. It goes on to state that the capacity and capability of performance management teams impacts on the extent to which they can operate most proficiently.
RESEARCH IN PRACTISE
A recent research in practise was undertaken with nineteen local authorities to explore their data usage at a local and regional level to inform strategic and operational planning and decision making.
The central object of the project to provide support for children and young people at the ‘edge of care’, including an exploration of the child level, and finance data aimed at gaining understanding about the throughput and trajectory of cases from early intervention. through statutory children’s social care services
The project identified a range of practices and initiatives whereby local area data sets are being linked and matched, either between agencies or across different parts of the children’s social care system.
It also revealed that Government analysis of such data sets is published with a significant time-lag and does not typically provide any indication of the pathways of children through social care services.