Interactive Service Guidance

For enabling schools to quickly navigate services available in the borough and identify appropriate services for vulnerable families

What it is

While working with the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham we realised that safeguarding teams in schools are not aware of all the services out there and they are always unaware of how to access the support. This results in referrals that are made to inappropriate services, which don’t fit the need or level of risk of the family, and in back and forth that contribute to the irreversible escalation of families' issues (approximately the 50% of referrals made are inappropriate). The Interactive Service Guidance enables school staff to quickly understand what services would be appropriate for vulnerable families. It is designed to be accessible through the Council website which is already referred to for information.

Patterns into action

The online guidance collates 4 patterns:

• The first one is the “Presenting Needs Check”. It is a tool that helps understand what the presenting need and level of risk of the child and family is, through a series of questions. It is based on information of service thresholds, and orients you to appropriate public services.

• The second pattern is the “Service Landscape”. It provides an up-to-date and easy to navigate list of services by combining public, voluntary and community services in the borough, based on needs and level of risk.

• The next one, is the “Expectation Cards”. It explains clearly what the service can and can not do, and what is expected from a referrer before making a referral to them.

• The last guidance tool is the “Chat Bot” which quickly answers queries and also helps navigate all of the other tools. For this to function, we created a database of the most frequently asked questions to the service that are fed into the chat bot.