A Shropshire council has become the first in the UK to
put in place a system for electronically sharing assessments of
vulnerable children with other public sector agencies.
Telford and Wrekin Borough Council has gone live with its
Information Sharing and Assessment service and expects other
agencies to use it to request social workers' assessments of
vulnerable children in electronic form.
The move comes ahead of the publication next month of guidance
from the Department for Education and Skills on best practice for
sharing assessment records. The guidance is part of efforts to
prevent a repeat of the death of Victoria Climbi‚, when agencies'
failure to share information prevented earlier intervention that
may have prevented her death.
Telford and Wrekin Borough Council piloted a limited version of
its Information Sharing and Assessment application in 2004-2005,
which provided users with an index of childcare practitioners who
had visited children, but had no electronic assessment of their
needs.
"The thing we learned from the pilot was that agencies want to
be signposted to other agencies that have contact with young
people," said Sara Tough, Telford and Wrekin's senior manager with
the Change for Children programme.
Before the system was introduced, social workers and other
childcare practitioners had to phone around agencies to find out
what work was being done on behalf of an at-risk child.
With the new system, practitioners are given different levels of
access to the information in the assessment records, depending on
the organisation they work for and their role within it.
At the moment, the agency that created the original assessment
still needs to give practitioners at other agencies permission
before they can view a particular record.
Tough said, "Historically, agencies all have their own
assessment arrangements, but they do not join up with one another.
Part of this cultural change is to get involved much earlier with a
child."
The Information Sharing and Assessment application was developed
by consultancy Ciber using Microsoft's Biztalk framework.
Telford and Wrekin's pilot project
Telford and Wrekin Borough Council piloted its Information
Sharing and Assessment system with more than 1,000 child welfare
practitioners. They represented 71 schools, eight social work
teams, 11 specialist local education authority teams, eight
Connexions teams, two family protection units from the police, two
youth offending teams and eight health centres.
The pilot covered both Telford and Wrekin and Shropshire County
Council. Between them, the two local authorities had responsibility
for more than 40,000 children.