The first web-based system to help councils meet new legal
requirements for information sharing among teachers, social workers
and healthcare professionals is due to go live this
month.
City of York Council is ready to introduce an "integrated
children's system" to meet the requirement for information sharing
across agencies under the Children Bill and recommended the Lord
Laming's inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie.
The eight-year-old died from abuse and neglect in 2000 while living
with her aunt and her aunt's boyfriend. Lord Laming cited the
failure to share information between professionals working in
healthcare, social care and education as a contributory factor in
Climbie's death.
Peter Dwyer, assistant director of children's services at City of
York Council, said the integrated children's system would help
avoid a repeat of the tragedy and would also speed up the
processing of assessments of vulnerable children in the York area.
"There is going to be a greater opportunity for organisations to
contribute to assessments from very different fields, whether from
schools, social services or GPs' surgeries. It should speed up the
processing and improve completion rates," he said.
York was one of four councils to pilot integrated childcare records
in a project headed by the Department for Education and Skills.
York developed the children's system in partnership with CareWorks,
a specialist provider of social care software systems.
All UK councils are due to process all new work electronically by
January 2006. The CareWorks system will meet about 80% of that
requirement, Dwyer said.
The system holds details of approximately 1,200 vulnerable children
in a database and will allow information of particular processes to
cascade into the right format for social workers, teachers or
healthcare professionals. This will avoid repeated data entry and
ensure that data used by the different groups is up to date.
The Department for Education and Skills has mandated all councils
to implement similar systems by the end of 2005. Earlier this year
it provided £20m of funding for the systems.
Dwyer urged local authorities to start work early. "It is more
significant than you might anticipate. You need high-level sign in,
it is not cost neutral, and you might need to update equipment. You
need agreement from staff working with the system about how
inter-agency access will work. It all takes time and it all needs
to be well project managed."