Customer Success Story:
Isle of Wight Council
Creating a connected approach to Early Help and Family Services
Sentinel Partners and Isle of Wight Council formed a data partnership in 2024 to modernise the way professionals access information, collaborate across services and support babies, children, young people and families.
Working closely with the Council, Sentinel delivered two digital solutions, an integrated Early Help and Prevention Data Warehouse and a suite of BrightBooking Portals to support Family Hubs and the Best Start in Life programme management. Together, these solutions have transformed how information is managed, improved multi-agency collaboration and made it easier for families to access the support they need in a timely manner.
Early Help and Prevention Data Warehouse
The Challenge
The Isle of Wight Council's Early Help service relied heavily on Word-based forms and manual processes to record family information and manage families support.
Professionals spent valuable time completing paperwork, searching for information across multiple systems and tracking the progress of family support plans. With information held in different locations, it was difficult to build a complete picture of a family's circumstances or coordinate support effectively between partner agencies.
Without a single, up-to-date view of each family, assessments, planning meetings and interventions became more time-consuming, increasing administrative pressures on professionals reducing the time available to support families directly.
The Solution
Sentinel Partners worked with the Isle of Wight Council to develop the Early Help and Prevention Data Warehouse that provides professionals with a single, trusted view of each family by bringing together information from key services including Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), Education, Parenting Support, Youth Justice and Early Help.
By bringing data together into one secure platform, professionals can quickly understand a family's circumstances, identify support needs earlier and make more informed decisions.
A key part of the solution was the introduction of dynamic forms and guided workflows. Replacing the previous Word-based processes, these structured digital forms provide lead workers with a clear, step-by-step approach to completing assessments, family closures. Each stage of the workflow only becomes available once the previous form has been completed, ensuring the correct process is followed from start to finish. Required fields, dropdown lists and structured data capture to improve the consistency and quality of information submitted, while supporting efficient review and approval by the Early Help team.
The Portals
Children & Family Portal
Supporting internal council professionals with case management, family records, assessments, support planning and performance dashboards.
Single View of the Family Portal
Providing role-based access for Lead Workers, Linked Workers and Social Workers to collaborate securely around a shared family record and support coordinated multi-agency working.
Multi-Agency Early Help & Prevention Hubs
Enabling authorised partner organisations to access and share information securely, improving communication, referral management and joined-up support for families.
The Outcome
The Early Help and Prevention Data Warehouse has transformed the way professionals work across the Isle of Wight.
By providing a single source of truth for family information, the platform enables teams to:
Make faster, better-informed decisions
Reduce administration and manual paperwork
Improve collaboration across agencies
Monitor cases and intervention plans more effectively
Deliver more coordinated support for babies, children and families
Ensure families only need to tell their story once
.png)
"Sentinel has been an outstanding partner since Phase 1 of our journey began in June 2024. Their support has consistently gone above and beyond, offering far more than we initially purchased. Their dedication and responsiveness have made a real difference to our success."
Kelly Quinn
Isle of Wight Council
Family Hubs and Best Start In Life Project
Challenge
As part of the Family Hubs and Best Start In Life programme, Isle of Wight needed a more efficient way for council teams and partners to manage families, create activities, administer bookings and record attendance. A single, secure system that would streamline administration and support the delivery of Family Hubs was required.
The Solution
Using Sentinel’s BrightBooking solution, Isle of Wight Council implemented a dedicated Family Hubs and Best Start In Life management portal.
The portal enables council teams and partner users to create and manage activities, administer bookings, manage family records and record attendance through a single, centralised system. Additionally, the portal enables the use of automated event driven emails for bookings, cancellations and alterations.
The Impact
The BrightBooking platform has enabled Isle of Wight Council to:
Streamline the administration of Family Hubs and Start for Life services.
Provide council teams and partner users with a single system for managing activities, bookings and family records.
Improve collaboration through secure, role-based access.
Centralise activity and attendance management, reducing manual administration.
