Information outputs for children’s services
Originally Department of Health, subsequently Department for Education and Skills. Undertaken in collaboration with Thomas Coram Research Unit.
The Green Paper: Every Child Matters, the National Service Framework for Children and the Quality Protects programme to reform the management of children’s social care, have all stressed the need to improve the uses of information in children’s services.
This project aimed to develop a framework for describing outputs from the information systems used in children’s social services. It suggests what information needs to be retrieved, and in what form, to enable local authorities to plan, operate and manage these services more effectively.
- Production of a conceptual framework and the preliminary identification of outputs by the research team.
- A consultation event to discuss these with a selected group of local authority managers who have a particular interest and expertise in the development of information systems.
- Consultation at practitioner and team manager level in six local authorities in both England and Wales to discuss the outputs they currently use and the additional ones they require to provide the necessary information to underpin practice.
- Discussions with the DH data modeller to check that the logical structure of the Data Model for Children’s Services will allow for this information to be extracted, and to advise if any of the existing entities need revising or expanding.
- Information systems in current use in children’s social services are generally designed more for recording information than for retrieving and using it, especially in daily practice, limiting their usefulness and reducing the quality of the data they contain.
- Outputs are not restricted to printed management reports, but what is extracted in any form from an information system, including for example screens, alerts, notifications, etc.
- Effective retrieval of information and use of outputs is impeded by a series of physical, design, security, skill and cultural constraints.
- If staff are rewarded for their work to record information by outputs which make their work easier, quicker and more effective, they are they are disposed to record information promptly and accurately.
- Information systems should enable users to find, filter and select information easily and flexibly.
- Statistics and reports should generally be accompanied by exception reports, screens or printed reports which identify the individual cases on which the statistic is based. This is essential to improve outcomes.
- Planning and commissioning can be facilitated if the information system provides cross-views of the data.
This work complements the Data Model and Process Model published by the
Department of Health’s Core Information Requirements programme, and
should assist local authorities with the implementation of the Integrated
Children’s System.
Gatehouse, M., Statham, J. and Ward, H. (2005) The Knowledge: How to get the information you need out of your computers and information systems - a practical guide for children’s social services. Understanding Children’s Social Care Series No. 9. London: DfES and Institute of Education.
Click here to download Evidence Paper 9
Professor Harriet Ward and Mike Gatehouse (CCFR) and June Statham (Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London).
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