Imagining a Centre of Excellence

A case for change

Children's social care has long been a special place to do data and digital work. Every data item matters, not only to budgets or work plans, but to the lives and experiences of some of our society’s most vulnerable children and families. Practitioners' digital tools have a significant impact on their ability to do their job effectively for the benefit of children and families. Specific technical challenges, and the nuances of local service delivery, combine to make the work as interesting as it is important.

Many of us began our children’s services careers in a world of paper records and minimal statistics. Since the widespread adoption of electronic case management systems, we’ve seen significant changes both to practice frameworks and the wider technology landscape, all in a context of constrained resources. The sector has approached these challenges and opportunities with local innovation and a growing, and active, desire for collaboration towards strategic interventions.

But attempts to use or repurpose longstanding institutions to meet new challenges, and new initiatives and organisations, have highlighted areas where we could do this work better, and thereby improve outcomes for individual children and families. We all need to help make it work.

Our invitation

With DfE funding and support, we’re scoping and designing a “Centre of Excellence” – a national support offer for data and digital work in children’s social care¹.

The Centre of Excellence is part of the government's wider reform agenda for children's social care, which aims to tackle key challenges in the system and improve outcomes for children and families. The Centre of Excellence aims to help build capacity in the sector to support the adoption of data and digital changes that come with significant reform, as well as supporting the sector to introduce key national objectives like a Single Unique Identifier and improvements to multi-agency information sharing.² Further, it should serve as a sustainable resource for sector-led improvements in local authority data and digital work.

Successfully creating a Centre of Excellence would represent real investment in the capability of local authorities (LAs) and their safeguarding partners to use data and digital in children’s services, and our consortium – Data to Insight, Coram, the LGA, Social Finance, and ICT Revolutions – will design it with the sector, ensuring it works well for individual organisations.

We know the Centre of Excellence will only be a success if it works in ways which the sector understands and welcomes. As sector-embedded organisations, we’re starting by laying out what we think, and asking colleagues to challenge and improve our understanding. Real engagement is crucial to our design work.

Clear opportunities

We see our sector as an inter-related system where context, status, quality, value and cost are key factors which interact to determine the whole system’s effectiveness.

From this perspective, we see huge opportunities to improve safeguarding services for children and families by improving our data and digital work. There exists a range of virtuous, and indeed vicious, cycles which we can influence to help local authorities and their safeguarding partners work well; we need to design a support offer which recognises the interactivity of these factors, and the real-world constraints faced by individual organisations.

But there’s a difference between knowing how things ought to work, and being able to make them work that way. We intend to design a Centre of Excellence with optimistic goals and pragmatic approaches. We already see a range of possible support which the Centre could provide, which we can align to three delivery strands identified in the DfE’s preparatory work for this project:

In the detailed appendices to this paper, we cite prior experience informing our understanding of these work areas, and highlight activities for the Centre of Excellence to consider in more detail. We welcome feedback and suggestions to help us refine our thinking as we begin our design work.

Alongside some LA-facing support for specific urgent issues, this programme’s core role is to approach a specification for a future Centre of Excellence. Over the next nine months, we will:

• Engage far and wide

• Experiment with key delivery approaches

• Evaluate evidence to inform our design work

• Design the Centre of Excellence

We’ll engage actively with as many stakeholders as possible during our work. We would especially welcome feedback via our structured feedback page

We’ll also engage with as many relevant groups and network meetings as possible, and would welcome further invitations. You can find us online at https://www.datatoinsight.org/coe

The rest of this paper discusses our initial problem analysis in more detail.

¹https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/042098-2025

²This agenda is set out in Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive (for the single unique identifier, see pp. 9-10)

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