Building data analysis skills through an adult social care apprenticeship
Building on the success of our apprenticeships for children’s social care analysts, we’re launching a new apprenticeship to teach key data skills to support adult social care.
Helping frontline professionals in children‘s social care better support families
Family Context is a digital tool that gives staff working across children’s services easy access to information about the families they are supporting, saving them time.
Social Finance started working on Family Context in 2018, when we were exploring common problems that local authorities experienced in children’s social care. Practitioners often have incomplete information on a particular individual and their family or rely on informal and ad-hoc information sharing agreements.
Why are we doing this?
We built Family Context to put the key information that social workers need into their hands and empower them to identify risks to children which would likely not have been spotted without it. This includes details such as:
- Family connections
- Service involvements
- Who to contact to find out more
The purpose of Family Context is to facilitate conversations with lead practitioners from other services, so that frontline practitioners can better support families and safeguard children.
1hr 40mins
Potential amount of time saved per assessment
Three
Full time social workers an average local authority would save per year
What we are doing
Together with Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council and Leeds City Council, we undertook extensive user-centred research, involving interviews, workshops, consultation and surveys with families, social workers, team leaders, senior leadership and more.
We found that social workers want access to the contact details of the lead practitioner of a case from other services (police, housing, schools and adult social care) and basic information on when the service was last involved with the family.
Using this information, we built the Family Context web app, making sure to focus on it being simple and intuitive to use. We worked with the Information Commissioner’s Office to develop a data protection impact assessment, which could be re-used by other local authorities. This was in response to insight from frontline professionals who say that with existing systems, information is old, logging in is hard, or navigation difficult.
It can be hard for local authority data and information governance teams to feel comfortable with personal identifiable information for vulnerable cohorts. To maximise the value and scale of our work to other local authorities, we worked with the Information Commissioner’s Office to develop a data protection impact assessment, which could be re-used by other local authorities.
Using the Family Context tool
Since its inception, Family Context has always aimed to be open source.
All the work has been done collaboratively and is publicly available in the project GitHub page, where you can find our user research, the business case, an implementation guide, and more.
You can watch a demonstration video below:
Problem: Social workers have incomplete or out-of-date information
Solution: Family Context allows social workers to find out which services support a particular family and empower them to make informed decisions more easily, improving the support children and families receive.
Problem: Social workers spend too much time chasing information
Solution: Family Context shows relevant information in one place. The tool can save social workers up to two hours for each new referral.
Problem: Social workers rely on informal information sharing
Solution: Family Context establishes a formal protocol and process for information sharing within teams, and is a key part of support and training for new or trainee social workers.
Using Family Context we’re able to find key information in a quicker timescale… it leads to a more timely response by the first response team.
Geraldine Conaghan, Senior Social Work Practitioner, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council
Impact and insights
In 2021 we launched Family Context as a pilot in Stockport. During this eight week phase, the tool achieved what it set out to do:
- It saved time for social workers, prioritising more time to spend with families.
- It empowered social workers to make informed decisions more easily.
- It better connected service around a family.
Family Context’s success led to the council rolling it out across their entire service.
You can read more about the pilot, and the local authority’s plans for the future of the project, on the Digital Stockport blog.
Family Context has also been hailed as an example of good data ethics and information sharing. Firstly, in 2020 it was cited by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in their data sharing code of practice as an example of an innovative way to share data while protecting people’s information. The ICO noted that Social Finance and the two local authorities
ran ethics workshops with the project team and conducted user research with those most likely to be affected by the data sharing
and that the tool
empowers social workers, enables professional judgement, protects privacy, and ultimately enables children and their families to access the right support and reach their potential.
Secondly, the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (John MacAlister, 2022) cited Family Context as an example of automated information sharing:
There are different ways that the right technology can facilitate and automate information sharing and help practitioners make good decisions about the information they receive. An example of this is Family Context. It gives professionals instant access to the lead practitioner in other authorities and basic information on when services were last involved with a family.
The tool has also been nominated for a Transforming and Innovating Public Services Award in the 2022 iNetwork Innovation Awards.
Since its inception, Family Context has always aimed to be open source.
All the work has been done collaboratively and is publicly available in the project GitHub page, where you can find our user research, the business case, an implementation guide, and more.
The team
Partners
Funders
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