What it is

Our research highlights that signs of neglect aren’t detected early enough and that there is a lot of crucial information on the family with the council that is not shared with schools. The Partner Information Portal provides school staff with access to crucial information of children and families at risk.  It sits within an existing software used by the Council to collate citizens’ data from across social care, housing, benefits and school census. With the Council holding so much information on vulnerable children and families, the question was how we can give schools secure access to crucial information, in an easy to understand and straightforward way so they can identify children at risk, and be able to support them much earlier.

 

Patterns into action

This intervention combines 3 patterns together.

 

The way it works is that safeguarding teams in schools access it with a secure login, which will then take them to a school dashboard that gives an overview of the presenting needs of the pupils, and services working with the various families (pattern: filtered group dashboard) . They can look up information by name as well, which will tell them if the child or members of his or her family have any current or past service involvement (pattern: filtered user profile). 

 

It also provides the safeguarding teams with an email alert when there are any immediate risks for a child, or updates from services working with the family. They can then view the information by logging into the portal (notification with a risk alert).