Sentinel Customer Success Story: Portsmouth City Council

Background

Portsmouth needed a new digital solution to improve the effectiveness and delivery of key city services for families and pupils. As an innovative council, its leaders had embraced data as an essential resource for helping vulnerable pupils and identifying opportunities for targeted family support.

After a referral to the council from another of our local authority clients, Sentinel was selected to provide its integrated data platform, which was configured and implemented to meet Portsmouth’s specific requirements.

“Sentinel is an absolutely phenomenal system for schools. It’s improved their safeguarding and gives them a really clear oversight of their vulnerable children. It enables schools to identify early warnings, particularly those children who may not have been flagged-up before."

Fran Shaul
Supporting Families Manager,
Portsmouth City Council

Solution

Working as Portsmouth City Council’s trusted data partner, we began by implementing the Sentinel Data Platform alongside a bespoke configuration of our Vulnerable Pupil Portal solution. This helps identify children who are vulnerable at the earliest opportunity.

These were followed by a Family Support Planning solution to make Portsmouth’s processes around early help assessments and support provision for families more streamlined and effective.

We then implemented our Supporting Families Phase 3 solution, to help Portsmouth meet the requirements of the greatly expanded Supporting Families Phase 3 DLUHC Programme.

Features included: family-overview and drill downs, chronological views, automatically prepared government returns with full audit trail of events and outcomes and controlled data matching so that eligible family information is up-to-date and accurate.

The initial implementation required integrating 30 different data feeds from council and partner data sources, to give the first holistic view of individuals and family groups across the city.

Sentinel’s platform has since become the foundation for expanded capabilities, including:

A digital solution to simplify planning and project management for programme managers.
A portal that enables users to create, complete and share forms covering all family members, as well as record progress on historic actions and apply scoring in multiple categories.
A bespoke version of the Vulnerable Pupil Portal solution to help identify at-risk children and prevent involvement in gang exploitation.
A Neurodiversity Profiling Portal that has been added to help identify children and young people with neuro-developmental needs and pinpoint the support they require.
A Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) capability to help the Portsmouth team better understand the needs of this community, including supporting alternative provision settings.

Results

Sentinel’s multiple integrated solutions for Portsmouth City Council have delivered important new capabilities that help improve pupil and family support and achieve better outcomes:

Vulnerable Pupil Portal

The Vulnerable Pupil Portal integrates data from multiple disparate sources, across systems and agencies. This creates a single view of each pupil, making it easier to identify alternative provision and support that can prevent issues from occurring or mitigate escalation. Every school, early years setting, and college received their own individual portal.

Improved communications with schools about pupils in need – real time updates on issues arising, ability to intervene prior to major escalations and to help children and young people stay engaged in education.
Fast access to contact information for lead practitioners when a child transitions between schools so as all notes and information are automatically carried over without data loss.

Family Support Planning

The FSP Portal is a digital solution for completing early help assessments from the wider workforce. It offers a case management overview for each lead professional.

Improved communication between authority and practitioners through shared system access, improved data quality, better access control, and integration with the Vulnerable Pupil Portal.
Improved identification of vulnerable children and the agencies involved with those children.
Integration with the Supporting Families Phase Three, allowing for better identification of family eligibility for the programme and improved reporting of the number of users on the system, agencies involved, and children and outstanding reviews.

Supporting Families Phase 3 Solution

Provides up-to-date, holistic and user-friendly records of individuals and family units. Its data sharing features facilitate collaborative working while automatic alerts help teams deliver important interventions when they are needed most. Managers can use the solution to draw down funds from the government.

Ability to generate a full, joined-up picture of families in-need, making it easier to see when needs are escalating and collaborate across multiple agencies to deliver the best approach.
Tracking of all the teams involved with a family.
Full claims processing from DFE for funding.

Neurodiversity

The Neurodiversity (ND) Profiling Tool which supports children and young people aged 0-19 with neuro-developmental needs, such as: speech and language difficulties, attention deficit disorders, emotional regulation, and sensory sensitivies.

Our system consolidates data from multiple agencies to create a comprehensive profile of each child, enabling tailored support strategies across various settings. By enriching the data on the ND Profiling Tool, we enable both professionals and families to make quick, well-informed decisions about the support needed.

Missing Exploited Trafficked (MET) & Gangs Portal

This portal provides specific information on children who are at risk of exploitation or becoming part of a gang.

The system brings together key data and enables identification of children currently at risk of exploitation, key hotspots, known associates, and tracking against police operations.

Special Educational Needs And Disabilities Solution

Sentinel is supporting Portsmouth with ensuring that they are meeting their deadlines around Education Health and Care Plans (EHCP) - part of their Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) service. The solution critical information to business decision makers:

Monthly EHCP submissions: KPIs which compare current data to the previous year.
Sources of requests: Understanding where the majority of referrals are coming from (e.g., schools, parents, carers).
Breakdowns by Key Stage: Data is further broken down by Key Stage to identify which groups of children are most impacted by delays.
Advice requests: Requests for advice from Health, Educational Psychologists, and Social Care are tracked, with on-time completion rates also measured.
Decision deadlines: The system monitors whether decisions are made within the required 6, 16, and 20-week deadlines.

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