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Freedom of Information Requests - Children's Services(CSC)

This site/dashboard provides the summarisation of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests related to Children’s Services.
It aggregates data from multiple sources, making it easier for analysts to track, compare, and with the future intention to enable more efficient response processes to FOI requests for Children's Social Care data.

  • Extract public FOI request records from sources such as:

    • WhatDoTheyKnow.com
    • Direct from Local Borough Councils web sites where available.
    • Direct(via email) from LA data/CSC team colleagues.

Remit

The creation of an automated/timely CSC resource for FOI requests, provides potential for proactive codified/sql response development, collaborative efforts towards develop once distribute 153x(with any other local authorities who receive similar requests) as well as providing a base for possible FOI data analysis/insights.

Overview

FOI requests are regularly submitted to multiple Local Authorities concurrently. The additional time-cost overheads on already stretched (data)teams often having impact into more critical BAU or insights reporting. By using the standardised SSD schema, the required query/code needed to generate the required FOI response data can be developed in cross-LA compatible manner; thus distributing(i.e minimising) the response overheads involved accross the sector. We (as D2I or sector colleagues) are then able to provide a pre-configured, zero cost, codified solution(as SQL, Python...) to any analyst/data team who might have also received the same or similar request. Enabling them to download, run the pre-developed query and instantly produce from their data the needed supporting FOI response data where available.

Prerequisites

Local authorities will need to have deployed the Standard Safeguarding Dataset (SSD) and/or be a contributor to this FOI Network in order to download any pre-developed response queries from the SSD tools repository.