The city council has adopted a a sophisticated data platform to support its SAFE programme, writes Helena Zaum, chief commercial officer at Sentinel Partners
Supporting vulnerable children and young people is one of the most sensitive and high stakes activities of local government, and councils that have the responsibility need deep insights from their data to carry it out successfully.
Among those which have shown what can be achieved is Liverpool City Council, which has been working with Sentinel Partners to use its relevant data through the company’s data platform.
John Bowers, data and information manager for the council’s SAFE (support, attend, fulfil, exceed) taskforce, described its progress at the recent UKAuthority AI and Data4Good conference, highlighting how it is contributing to reducing youth violence in the city.
It is part of Liverpool’s Supporting Families programme, which currently involves a three-year effort (2022-25) to identify and deliver outcomes for almost 5,000 complex families in the city.
The council began to work with Sentinel in 2018, investing in a data management solution into which it has since provided around 70 data feeds from sources including mental health services, the police and the Department for Work and Pensions. These help to identify family needs and issues and feed into decisions on what types of interventions are required.
The work includes the ongoing development of an Early Years Intelligence Portal and Family Hub data management solution, and the integration of PowerBI to create management level dashboards and scorecards. Now the council has turned its attention to finding and supporting young people who could be involved in serious violence or have issues around exploitation.
Identifying vulnerability
As part of the SAFE programme, an initial assessment by the council’s SAFE taskforce highlighted the need to identify young people who were vulnerable to issues such as violence or mental health problems in their families, a bad influence from peer groups or drug dealing in their neighbourhoods.
Bowers provided glimpses of a number of cases in which children and young people were killed in incidents related to criminal activity and gang violence, and said the council looked at the profiles of the offenders in each case to find key characteristics. It wanted to build a system that showed young people with those “trigger points” that could lead them towards becoming offenders, and help direct its efforts towards supporting their families to steer them away from crime.
The taskforce was also aware of the ethical issues in collecting relevant data, which led it to consult with the Department for Education and use the Government’s Data Ethics Framework. This involved the judgement that the greatest risk was that if it did not use the data available more young people would be vulnerable to becoming involved in violence.
It also made sure that it processed data within the terms of the Data Protection Act, carried out data protection impact assessments, sent privacy notices to schools to explain how and why the data was being used, and utilised the Digital Economy Act as a legal gateway for processing the information. It was also able to refer to terms of the Children Act on safeguarding.
The portal has brought together information from schools (on factors such as attendance, exclusions and special educational needs), youth offending, police arrest records and intelligence, health information, historic education data, early help status and social care.
Controlling access
This is all within a data architecture – built on that already used for Supporting Families – that is proportionate to the purpose. A key point in this was that it only allows access to the information on a ‘need to know’ basis, by head teachers and safeguarding leads, for allocating interventions by the SAFE taskforce.
Bowers emphasised that human oversight is crucial: the system is used to identify concerns but not make decisions on what should be done, which remains in the hands of the professionals involved.
The portal can show details of a school including the number of pupils with issues that can make them vulnerable. A head teacher can identify a young person then look at details related to the school and all the factors around the risk of exploitation.
This can then be linked with the Supporting Families database to identify other relevant issues; and all the information can be brought together in a chronology.
“If you look at all those issues together, it can paint the best environmental picture of what’s the best way to support that young person,” Bowers said.
Example of success
He was able to point to an example from early 2024 of an unnamed young person who had been identified through an examination of the data on the portal, and was seen as at risk of being exploited due to a lack personal boundaries, limited social skills and undiagnosed learning difficulties. This led to a series of group and individual intervention sessions to help the child understand social interactions and refer them to specialist support services.
As a result there had been no more reports of anti-social behaviour, the child’s school attendance had risen to 100%, they were receiving support for ADHD and there had been a general improvement in behaviour.
Sentinel has supported other Liverpool initiatives outside the SAFE programme, including the council's response to Covid-19 in identifying vulnerable people, and work around gangs in the city.
There has also been a pilot on the use of the platform with data on domestic abuse, and discussions are now taking place to adapt the portal for use by the local multi-agency safeguarding operation and the council’s social care and early help teams.
This provides a prime example of what can be achieved with the Sentinel data platform. The company has a specialism around highly sensitive use cases and information governance, and the platform helps organisations to understand the relationships between people in its communities and stratify them around levels of risk.
The platform is built with a focus on usability in mind - with a 'no code' style user interface – minimising the need for in-depth coding skills – and can provide support in preparing data for use with AI. It can also be used for a range of purposes, such as ongoing initiatives to identify unpaid carers in adult social care and to provide a single view of debt and recovery.
This all makes it a valuable tool for local authorities in helping to improve the lives of their communities.
For further information, please get in touch with Helena Zaum via LinkedIn, or at sales.alerts@sentinelpartners.co.uk.
Watch John Bowers' presentation
