The lives of thousands of citizens across a city in south east England have been turned around thanks to a joint venture between Capita and a local authority to support delivery of the government’s Supporting Families programme.
Over the last five years more than 1,600 families have been supported by the authority and its partners, with more than 1,250 of those achieving significant and sustained progress, including continuous employment.
The success of their programme led the council to extend its capabilities, making them fully prepared for October 2022, when the government expands the delivery and reporting of the national programme. As changemakers, their work has also been nationally recognised for the outcomes achieved.
Over 1,600 families have been supported by the authority and its partners
Strengthening families and strengthening communities
As a long-standing Capita customer, the council had been using Single View and our One Education solution for several years to successfully support its ‘whole family’ approach to working with vulnerable citizens, as part of its Strengthening Families programme.
The intuitive Single View software, powered by Fibonacci, has been used to bring together databases including school admissions and attendance, social care, transport, youth justice, early years and health, as well as data from many other sources, to build a comprehensive, integrated dataset that shows a family’s situation from every perspective. This allows teams to make better-informed decisions about the support vulnerable children, individuals and families might need, enabling early intervention before crisis point is reached.
In April 2022, the government relaunched the Supporting Families programme across the UK with a further £165million of funding to run for a further three years – expanding the number of data sets the programme collects from six to ten, and extending the criteria for eligibility from families with dependent children to expectant parents, families at risk of homelessness and experiencing in-work poverty, and families involved in gangs, knife crime and County Lines.
From October 2022 councils need to find a way of meeting the challenge of integrating multiple new sets of data from different services, systems, and partner organisations.
For this council, it has been a seamless transition.
The capabilities of Single View have enabled Capita to design and integrate the additional data needed for the new Supporting Families framework measures - and eligibility criteria - to the council’s existing datasets and those of its partners, including children’s centres, housing associations, police forces and individual schools across the city.
By using Single View to draw data from all these multiple sources and pulling what’s needed from the council’s existing One Education platform, the council can now automatically identify families who meet the new criteria for support as part of the expanded programme, and provide teams with real-time updates and alerts across the many different agencies and services that might be involved in a family’s case.
Realising the true value of real-time data
Without this integrated solution, eligible and vulnerable citizens and families could be missed and fail to receive the support they need as the process for identifying them in many authorities is often a manual one, based on requesting already stretched social care case workers - who also benefit from using Single View daily to accessing client notes rather than multiple systems - to complete additional forms to help highlight eligible cases.
Crucially, Single View significantly reduces the time spent preparing payment by results claims that the council makes to government for the outcomes it achieves, more effectively securing future funding which is reinvested back into the programme.
Deploying Single View to integrate data from One Education, and the other council and partner systems, means teams are in the very best position to:
- identify causes for concern among vulnerable children, adults and families sooner
- ensure all partners and agencies working with a family have a single, integrated version of the truth in the form of intelligent, real-time dashboards and outputs
- make proactive – rather than reactive – decisions and interventions
- identify vulnerable families in real time as their situations change
- limit the escalation of need, proactively intervening early to reduce families reaching social care thresholds
- evidence payment by results claims faster and more effectively
The potential of Single View
As well as preparing for the expanded Supporting Families programme, councils are also facing mounting pressure across all of the services they deliver - including addressing the Levelling Up agenda, defining their roles within new integrated care systems, supporting communities as part of the cost of living crisis and providing for citizens experiencing food and fuel poverty.
Capita’s Single View works by combining multiple data sources to flag vulnerable people and unfolding situations that would otherwise remain hidden – and importantly, before the situations escalate.
It can be deployed in as little as four weeks, providing real-time data integration with internal and external partners across a range of different services.
