Sentinel Customer Success Story: Liverpool City Council
Background
Liverpool’s ‘Earned Autonomy’ status under UK government’s Supporting Families programme has allowed it to accelerate its digital transformation programme and bring about more effective and integrated city services. To enable the transformation, however, delivery systems and processes needed to become more data driven.
After a referral from Birmingham City Council, Sentinel was selected to provide its integrated data management platform, which was configured and implemented to meet Liverpool’s specific requirements.
‘Liverpool was struggling to link vast amounts of data and at risk of not achieving its programme targets. The developments with Sentinel to improve data linkage for identifying complex families, partner work with families, and tracking outcomes have seen Liverpool achieve and exceed annual targets.’
John Bowers
Supporting Families Programme, Family Hub,
and SAFE Taskforce Data and Information Manager
Solution
Sentinel and Liverpool’s partnership began with the Troubled Families 2 programme which saw 35 core data feeds implemented, creating a unified repository of residents and families across the City. This allowed managers to identify how many families lived in the City and which of those families needed immediate support. This work evolved into the Supporting Families 3 programme, establishing a much more comprehensive view of families and children whose circumstances meant they were at risk of escalation – a cohort some 193% larger than originally anticipated.
This work led to some critical work for the partnership using data to better identify gang networks across the city.
When Covid hit, Sentinel and Liverpool worked in partnership to integrate 13 new NHS data feeds and provide a fully profiled single view of vulnerable individuals to Public Health England. This tactical Covid response was commissioned, configured, and implemented within two weeks, going live in early April 2020. Later during the pandemic, this enabled Public Health England and the Liverpool team to run the UK's first mass test-and-trace programme across the Northwest, which proved to be very successful.
Sentinel also helped Liverpool create its Vulnerable Pupil Portal (VPP) using the Sentinel Data Platform. It is designed to support and empower UK SAFE (Support, Attend, Fulfil, Exceed) taskforces in protecting children from becoming involved in crime, county lines, and gang exploitation. Bringing together data from schools, youth offending, police arrest records and intelligence, health information, historic education data, early help status and social care. The portal has helped Liverpool’s practitioners highlight key trigger points to identify and better young people who are particularly susceptible to offend, and therefore to better target their preventative work.
Results
Immediately after implementation of the Supporting Families module, Liverpool could identify how many families lived in the city and how many of those families needed immediate support. This new target cohort was 193% larger than was previously known.
The Platform also identified how many families should be the focus of Early Help, providing a new target cohort that was 130% larger than previously known. A specific dashboard for Early Help was implemented, identifying over 4000 families in need of early intervention.
By integrating data from multiple sources, systems and agencies, the portal has established a complete picture of need across the city, helping ensure the appropriate level of alternative and specialist support is delivered.
Based on those successes, the Sentinel Data Platform was extended to include a gangs module that helps identify gang members and those connected to them who are more vulnerable to recruitment.
It also played an important role in the implementation of the UK's first mass COVID test-and-trace programme, which took place in Liverpool.
In this Video, John discusses the progress we have made in our long-standing relationship since 2018. By partnering with Sentinel Partners, Liverpool City Council created a powerful system that identifies at-risk young people and directs targeted interventions, all while ensuring data privacy and ethical use.
Acknowledged Data Leadership
As a result of its successful data transformation, Liverpool City Council is frequently cited as an exemplar authority by government departments such as the DfE and the Dept for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities for their advanced uses for Data in providing more targeted and affective services.
Liverpool’s data leaders are also called upon to run or support Government online seminars and workshop sessions to help share best practice with other authorities across the country. They have also taken part in national conferences to share their experiences with the wider UK Public Sector.
Vulnerable Pupil Portal Key Features
- Dashboards risk criteria for vulnerable children.
- Advanced search functionality by pupil.
- Centralised notes to improve collaboration across settings and agencies.
- Automated user alerts, including behavioral and attendance triggers.
- Law enforcement dashboards, functionals, and access controls.
- Overviews containing all information in a single screen.
- Workflow support with full lists of past and upcoming actions and events.
Future Plans
Liverpool’s plans for their use of the Sentinel platform continue to develop. Upcoming work is focused on the development of Family Hubs and an Early Years Intelligence Portal. The Early Years Intelligence Portal will capture information about developmental milestone attainment for children who are between the ages of 2-5. This can provide important insights to ensure children experiencing difficulties are supported early on and that schools are ready to support any special educational needs. Liverpool are also looking at how the data held in their Sentinel system can help them reduce the number of young people not in education, employment or training.
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