North Yorkshire County Council

North Yorkshire County Council (NYCC) is the county council governing the non-metropolitan county of North Yorkshire in England. Encompassing 7 districts, the Office of National Statistics estimated the population of North Yorkshire to be 604,900 in 2016.

The county council provides services across North Yorkshire including Harrogate, Ripon, Scarborough, Whitby, Northallerton, Thirsk, Selby, Tadcaster, Malton, Pickering, Richmond, Skipton. From 2021, NYCC began the transition to move to a unitary authority, by integrating services from across its 7 district councils into the County level organisation.

The Problem

North Yorkshire's Children and Young People's Service (CYPS) was designated as a Department for Education (DfE) Partner in Practice (PiP) in 2016, one of only Fifteen Local Authorities nationally, chosen as part of the programme.

Through the PiP programme, NYCC delivered innovation and new working practices, moving towards their ambition to become and remain rated outstanding for Children’s Social Care.

As part of this, a Single View of Child (SVoC) project was initiated to improve the safeguarding of children and young people through the delivery of more effective and timely information to staff across Directorates and partners such as Health and North Yorkshire Police (NYP).

The purpose of the SVoC project, was to ensure the creation of an accurate, holistic, up to date record, that can be delivered to staff across various teams and partner agencies, with the aim of reducing the challenges identified when supporting a child or young person.

NYCC required a suitable software solution capable of creating and maintaining this single master record or ‘golden’ record for a child, whereby all relevant key information about them is available for staff at first contact, instead of having this data duplicated across the various systems and silos currently employed.

NYCC needed to reduce the time spent tracking down relevant background information for a child or young person and provide frontline staff and management with access to the latest relevant information around the child as quickly and efficiently as possible.


What needed to be done?

Sentinel’s industry leading Data Integration Platform has the flexibility and capability to integrate, transform and profile extremely large volumes of complex data consistently and compliantly from any data source. One of the standard Portal views provided over this integrated dataset is their Single View Portal, which can be used to visualize and share a holistic single view of any data content available within the platform.

Sentinel’s Data Integration platform and Single View of Child Portal was implemented and made available to MAST (Multi Agency Safeguarding Team) users, enabling earlier and more informed decision making and intervention.

The key features of Sentinel’s Data Integration platform and Single View of Child Portal that mattered the most to NYCC were:

  • Allows data to be integrated from any council systems, and any partner agencies such as the Police, NHS and central government departments
  • Any number of data sources can be merged together, and this can be added to at any time
  • Data is matched to produce a complete picture of each person
  • In-built data profiling functionality can be used to help identify target individuals
  • The solution builds up a longitudinal view of individuals and can highlight those in need of help
  • Additional Portal views can be added at any time to share data with external partners such as North Yorkshire Police

How we solved the problem

North Yorkshire County Council was the first local authority to receive “Outstanding” across the board in the Ofsted ILACS inspection.

Sentinel’s technology allows CYPS staff to access all relevant information at first contact, assisting their work to provide help and support as early as possible. Jess Markwart, Group Manager Access and Multiple Vulnerabilities at NYCC, said “Having the platform Sentinel provide at the front door helps social workers.... The Single View of Child has been received positively and even after only a few weeks has made an impact, using a much broader set of data to make the right decisions at the right time.” 

Learn more about the Single View of Child Solution

Single View of Child

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