Sentinel Customer Success Story: Birmingham Children's Trust

Background

Birmingham Children’s Trust (BCT) needed to improve how it identified and supported thousands of families across the city. As part of the UK’s national Supporting Families programme and focus on early help, local authorities are assigned a target number of families to identify, work with and support.

Identification of eligible families, however, is a significant challenge. Operating the programme requires multiple delivery teams and partner agencies to collect data then manage it across different systems and databases. Data must be matched to form a complete view of individuals and family members and then combined into family compositions.

Improving data management would be a crucial first step to achieving the Trust’s objectives.

“One of the drivers in the use of data is the moral imperative to make people’s lives better where they’re facing a particular challenge. Using data effectively through Sentinel has been an aid to us, triangulating what we think we know is helpful, and telling us what we should know is valuable.”

Daniel Taylor
Supporting Families Programme Manager,
Birmingham Children’s Trust

Solution

For families that qualify, continual monitoring of needs and progress is required. This would be a daunting challenge for any local authority, but for a city the size of Birmingham, the task is massive. Integrating and profiling needs to be automated reliably to enable local authority teams and their partners such as BCT, to focus efforts on those most in need.

Sentinel deployed its Data Platform to enable BCT to integrate, transform and profile extremely large volumes of complex data consistently and compliantly from any source.

Using the platform as a base, we deployed a comprehensive solution with multiple components:

Children’s data hub – integrating three data feeds and 450,000 records.
Supporting Families solution – encompassing the original Troubled Families Programme phases 1 and 2 and the current Supporting Families Programme (phase 3).
Supporting Families Portal – designed address the requirements of Supporting Families.
Covid 19 response – integrating 13 new NHS data feeds to provide a single view of at-risk individuals.
Migration to cloud – managing a seamless data transition from on-premises systems to a cloud-based repository.
Insight analytics – a dashboard for senior management to support decision making.

Due to the sensitivity of the information involved, strict record controls and access rights were an integral part of the solution. Information is strictly protected and only shared on a tightly controlled, need-to-know basis.

Results

BCT has successfully used Sentinel’s Supporting Families solution across all phases of the national programme, enabling them to meet all central government targets.

The solution has been extended and enhanced several times to meet all national and local government’s requirements and objectives for subsequent phases of the programme.

Using Sentinel’s platform, the trust can now identify more families in need – regardless of whether they are already working with the family or not.

The BCT team can confirm the eligibility and Payment by Results (PBR) status of more families for the programme with greater ease. Many of these families are now funded, with successful outcomes, achieving significant and sustained progress.

The Sentinel data platform has also enabled the council to identify significantly more cases of domestic and emotional abuse that might previously have been missed.

Sentinel’s Supporting Families Solution – Key Capabilities

Integrates data from any council or partner agency system.
Merges and matches data from any number of source repositories.
Creates a complete picture of each family member.
Bespoke profiling tools provide a fully flexible and automated method of measuring each families’ circumstances against programme eligibility criteria.

A Supporting Families Case is created automatically for each family composition.
The solution tracks incidents, events and outcomes for all families, along with monitoring of support services provided.
The solution also highlights families eligible for Payment by Result (PBR) claims.

View Sentinel and BCT's joint presentation to UK Authority at :

https://www.ukauthority.com/articles/a-data-platform-for-stronger-safeguarding/

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