Better Data on Children in Care: Building a Common Model — Our 3rd Show-and-Tell!
On Monday, we all gathered in Manchester for our third show-and-tell session. (If you didn’t hear about our last one, click here.) This time, we looked at what the fundamental decisions that affect the lives of children in care are. We want to know where further data and evidence is needed to improve these decisions.
Who makes decisions about children in care?
We interviewed people in various leadership positions in Children’s Services Departments. This included Heads of Children’s Services, Heads of Services, and Commissioning and Placement Leads. Across Wigan, Stockport and Manchester, we spoke to a total of 11 decision-makers.
What decisions do they make?
From our interviews, we found that these decisions break down into two categories:
- Strategic — these are long-term decisions on how to best run the services and department as a whole. E.g. Which services should we invest in? How should we prioritise our resources?
- Operational — these are day-to-day decisions responding to specific situations. E.g. What type of placement would best meet the needs of this child? What other support services do we need to provide to this child/family?
The key decisions are around where to place a child in care. Can they be fostered? Should they be placed in a residential home? These decisions need to be made as quickly as possible, but if management get it wrong, this can have a drastic impact on the child’s immediate and future well-being.
What do decision-makers care about?
Management want to be certain they are making the best decisions for the children in their care. Are the placements working well for the children? What happens to the children later in their lives? How is the system working as a whole?
Understanding the answers to these questions can change the course of a child’s life. Yet, getting these answers is not straightforward. This is where data plays a vital role.
What do leadership need to make these decisions?
Decision-makers need various pieces of data to make decisions. For the operational decisions, a lot of the information needed is there already. For example, placement managers know what options are available and have extensive experience of making these decisions and the Social Worker will know the child and their needs well.
Making strategic decisions is more difficult. Leadership lack a lot of the data needed to make these decisions. Specifically, they need (but don’t always have):
- Better analysis of data so they can get to the heart of the problem
- Information on what happens to young people in their lives after care
- Live, up-to-date data
- Understanding of what it is like to be in care, from the child’s point of view
- Background information to make the data meaningful
So what are we going to do about it?
We had an initial brainstorm of potential solutions. Three came out as the most popular and most workable:
- Develop an “error-analysis” tool. This would show local authorities if they are experiencing errors that other councils don’t have. Authorities could then get together and share solutions for particular error types. This would improve the overall accuracy of the data — which is vital for making good decisions.
- Develop a simple data-set that all authorities will keep up-to-date throughout the year. Year-round access to up-to-date, common data-sets would make decisions easier. Councils would also then be able to share tools and findings with each other.
- Work with managers and directors to better understand what analysis they want. This will help analysts use their time most effectively to meet decision-makers’ needs.
What’s next?
Over the next couple of weeks we will be writing up our findings in three key reports:
- A detailed user research report. This will explain the problem areas and needs that we have identified over the past two months
- Initial ideas for potential solutions to these problems
- A business case
We are holding our next show-and-tell in two weeks’ time, but we’ll be back next week with more updates!
