Hackney Council is looking at the possibilities in joining up education and children’s social care data for the borough.
It has published details of a project, in the form of a procurement notice for support, aimed at understanding the opportunities if it was easier to bring the data from the two operations together, and for the relevant insight teams to collaborate more closely.
As things stand, they take data from separate systems and present these through spreadsheets, reports and Tableau social care system of Qlik, the council’s business visualisation tool. The council also has operational dashboards on which it has been able to join up data from business applications in its response to Covid-19, supported by investments in APIs.
But it does not routinely join up education and social care data for research and development, and feels that by doing so it could improve collaboration and outcomes in areas such as the design of early help and understanding the impact of temporary accommodation on children’s education.
It could also help council workers and education professionals understand how factors from the other sector are affecting a child.
The market notice says: “A successful project will provide tangible examples of the insights that might be available, a high level business case for the costs and benefits of a different operating model, the immediate steps necessary to achieve this and the types of challenges that need to be explored through further work.”
Image by John D, CC BY 2.0
