Supporting Families Programme Solution

Our Supporting Families Solution has been specifically designed to meet the requirements of the Supporting Families Programmes and help identify and support vulnerable families.

Tackling key issues faced by front-line teams, the innovative software quickly and easily transforms the quality and breadth of data at your disposal, without the need for a costly and intrusive transformational project.

It also enables individual teams to set and automatically apply discretionary criteria so they can identify families that require support.

Identifying and supporting families who need to turn their lives around is challenging for local authorities and their partner agencies.

The most immediate problem is inaccurate, fragmented data, with incomplete or inconsistent information failing to present a clear picture. Targets could be missed and stretched resources misdirected. Critically, those families who need help may not receive it.

Sentinel’s Supporting Family Data Platform is successfully enabling local authorities to overcome these issues, transforming their programmes and driving earlier, appropriate intervention.

Our software matches and integrates data from all available sources to provide up-to-date, holistic and user-friendly records of individuals and family units. The data sharing features of the platform also facilitate collaborative and proactive working.

Fully configurable, it puts you in control of setting profiling criteria and the scenarios that trigger automatic alerts – so you can deliver the early interventions that families need.

Developed to meet the evolving requirements of the Supporting Families Programme (previously Troubled Families), our agile solution helps our clients conform to the Data Maturity Model while enabling them to look ahead and respond to future Government initiatives.

Supporting Families Programme Background and Next Phase 2022-2025

The Supporting Families Programme is administered by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (or DLUHC, formerly the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG)).

Click here to view the latest updates from DLUHC about the Supporting Families Programme 2022-2025.

The original Troubled Families Programme was the first national, systematic approach to driving real change in outcomes for families with multiple problems and to change the services that worked with them. Under this programme, each local authority was assigned a target number of families to identify, work with and support.

The challenge for local authorities was to identify eligible families. By its very nature, the programme’s aim to improve outcomes for families with multiple problems means that working and support provision needs encompass multiple teams and partner agencies, with data being collected and managed in a huge number of different systems and databases.

Information needs to be collected multiple data sources, matched together to form a complete view of every family member, and then rolled up into family compositions. These family compositions then need to be profiled to assess their levels of need and confirm if these needs match the requirements defined by the national programme. For families that do qualify for the programme, continual monitoring of their needs and progress is required to measure progress and outcomes.

Local authorities must evidence the turn-around of families they identify and support and need the ability to track their journey and show the progress they make. This evidencing needed to incorporate information from all supporting services and partners, such as social care, schools, NHS and Police records. Without this evidencing a local authority cannot receive their funding by proving their progress for Payment by Results (PBR) claims.

In April 2022 the next phase of the Supporting Families Programme was released and comes into effect in October 2022. In the 2021 Budget and Spending Round an additional £200 million investment was announced to expand the programme. This represents around a 40% real-terms uplift in funding for the programme by 2024-25, taking total planned investment across the next three years to £695 million.

This new phase of the programme has two key objectives:

• To see vulnerable families thrive, building their resilience by providing effective, whole family support to help prevent escalation into statutory services
• To drive system change locally and nationally, working with local authorities and their partners to create joined up local services, able to identify families in need, provide the right support at the right time, and track their outcomes in the long term

Powerful, flexible, forward-looking technology for your Supporting Families programme

The Supporting Families Data Platform ensures that the information you need is always at your fingertips. Further features include:

• Family-overview and drill-down screens that show you the full picture
• A single point of access for improved data sharing and collaborative working
• You control the rules to validate and merge people’s data
• You set and manage your own criteria
• Automatic data profiling to identify families in need and provide early help
• Maximised PBR claims bringing increased income
• Automatically prepared Government returns, evidenced by a full chronology of events and outcomes

How our Supporting Families Platform will help

• All information collated in one central place.
  It can be challenging to pull together vital information on families when you are dealing with so many different data sources. Our solution automatically collects information from any structured data source, including your own systems, standalone databases, and those of partner agencies such as the police, NHS, DWP (Department of Work & Pensions) and housing associations and collates it in one central place.
• Automated DLUHC returns and detailed reports.
  For many local authorities producing the DLUHC Returns is a manual and time-consuming task, with a substantial risk of errors.  Our Supporting Families Solution provides an automated answer to all your DLUHC return requirements. With one click you can produce a detailed NIS costing report, the Family Progress Data (FPD) return and PBR claim. All such outputs can be viewed on screen and then downloaded locally to be sent on at your convenience. 
• The information collected in the Supporting Family Platform becomes the most complete and quality-controlled data available.
  The quality and accuracy of the data you work with can vary significantly. Our solution enables you to set your own configurable rules for validating, profiling, and cleansing incoming information while also identifying poor data sources.
• Controlled Data Merging.
  Merging data can be challenging. It is often a manual process involving many iterations of spreadsheet or database functions. With our Supporting Families Solution merging is also controlled by configurable rules within the Platform. These can be set up to automatically carry out merges where there is a confident match. Alternatively, the system can be used to identify potential merges, even where there is misspelling, mistyping or deliberate attempts to deceive. You can review the proposals and decide whether to accept or reject the merge. The Platform will remember your merging decision for future processing, so you do not need to review each time.
  
  In addition, the Platform will learn from local information you add. Providing information on known twins, common names, and common addresses (such as hostels and temporary B&B accommodation) can be used to assess the confidence on potential merges to help you decide.
• Data Protection by Design approach includes full audit trails for every merge or proposed merge.
  All our solutions are built on a ‘Data Protection by Design’ approach. This means that there is a full audit trail available for every merge or proposed merge carried out within the Platform.
• Remove risk and save time: Consistent and robust sets of decisions applied automatically to every new record.
  Because manual processes carry a risk of errors, organisations often spend a lot of time trying to check results. There are better ways to monitor and check results. After spending some valuable time with us during the implementation phase to set up, test and adjust rules (we provide a standard set to get you started), you will know what rules exist and what results to expect. With these in place you have a consistent and robust set of decisions that will be applied automatically to every new record.
• Up-to-date and accurate lists of all families that have crossed eligibility thresholds.
  Individual records are merged to form a single holistic view for each family member and then linked together to create family units. This is done automatically each night, or every time you receive new data.
  
  As a result, our solution has all the key information available across the family and can compare this against the threshold criteria that you set. The results of this comparison are presented to you daily, giving your team an up-to-date list of all the families that have crossed the eligibility threshold.
• Remove the need for manual efforts.
  Our solution removes the manual effort required to collect, analyse, and merge people and family information. Instead, it is all done automatically, based on the business rules you define.
• Support PBR claims by seeing exactly what have been provided and the outcomes achieved.
  Often, an organisation’s merging processes are focused on trying to bring people’s data together but cannot always capture the outcomes of families for PBR claims or understand which types of intervention / support activities are proving most successful. Our solution can collect and combine any information you want to include, for example all key events and outcomes from front line systems and data collected directly via on-line forms, to build up a full chronology of activities against a family. To support PBR claims you can also see exactly what support a family has received and the outcomes achieved. Finally, you can report on outcomes against the various activity types to review effectiveness across your Supporting Families programme.

As events like a school exclusion, domestic violence conviction or health concern are collected, the Platform will notify you that the family needs to be assessed. It will also show you the full chronology of events relating to each individual family member that led to the family crossing the threshold.

Data is combined into holistic views of each person and each person is linked into family units. Other links can also be added and managed such as extended families (adults with children linked to different partners and properties) or gang membership (provided by youth offending system).

A second click enables users to drill down further so they can view details of any family member and the current and historical information that is known about them. It is also possible to see if the issues are new or re-occurring and whether the family has already been a part of your Supporting Families / Troubled Families programme before.

Once you decide to accept or reject a family onto your Supporting Families programme, the solution will keep an audit trail of the decision and allow you to enter additional information to support the decision.