Dear Data to Insight colleagues –
Please find below another bundle of news, within which I hope you’ll find something of interest. As always, if you want to talk about this stuff, or have ideas for how we can do useful things – or how you’d like to get involved – then reply to this email and let us know what you’re thinking about.
Please note that some links below will only work for LA employees with a D2I website account. If you are receiving this email by forward, and are not currently a D2I site member, you can join our mailing list and website by navigating to www.datatoinsight.org and using the Log In / Sign Up link towards the top right of the screen.
SEN2 analysis tool prototype
Apprenticeship briefing sessions
RIIA and EH Q4 analysis
Safeguarding Pressures 9 data request – updated
D2I Annual Report 2024
Upcoming events
Credits
1. SEN2 analysis tool prototype
We’re happy to share a first draft of a new tool to analyse SEN2 return data, which is now ready for feedback from colleagues. This tool provides visualisations based on SEND data held by local authorities (LAs) in the standard format of the “SEN2” special educational needs survey. Until recently, the “SEN2” data was produced by LAs as aggregate data. The survey is now a client-level survey, meaning that a standard client-level dataset is available for analysis by LAs.
The standard dataset is, however, fairly limited in scope, which limits what the analysis tool can do. We know one thing we can do is expand to incorporate the Ofsted “SEND Annex A” lists as well, but we’re particularly interested in feedback from colleagues about specifically what they would like to see in the tool, what would be useful to add or change, or any other ideas about how to further develop this.
You’ll find detailed instructions on how to use the tool on the “about” tab – please make sure especially to format your source data according to the instructions, or it won’t load properly.
You can send us feedback by email - we're also happy to meet and discuss the tool with anyone who’d find that useful.
2. Apprenticeship briefing sessions
We’re gearing up to launch another cohort of our Children’s Services Data Analyst L4 apprenticeship, delivered by Corndel. This is a tailored level 4 apprenticeship requiring about 20% of your working week over an 18 month period, fully funded by the Apprenticeship Levy, and we’ve already had more than 100 enrolments across our previous cohorts. The course is developing over time based on feedback from participants, and much of that feedback has been positive.
You can read more about the programme at the link above, but we’ll also be hosting insight sessions in the near future and would encourage you to register interest in attending one of those to find out more, either for yourself or any colleagues in your team who may benefit. Learning commences 31st October 2024, so there’s plenty of time after the briefing sessions to consider your options and get an application in.
3. RIIA and EH Q4 analysis
As promised, we held briefing sessions last month on Q4 of the RIIA and Early Help data collections, leading to some fascinating conversation with LA colleagues who attended, and we’ve shared the prompt documents for those sessions on our website (links above). Each document gives a national overview of any interesting themes emerging in the quarterly datasets, and they make for interesting reading in their own right.
For the Early Help collection, last quarter saw us hit the ‘4 quarters of data’ milestone, with 70 Local Authorities submitting data. With another region signed up for the upcoming Q1 return, we expect over half of all LAs in England to be participating; a really fantastic achievement for a voluntary return. It’s a testament to the hard work of data teams across the country that this has worked and we’re grateful for your continued support.
The return date for Early Help Q1 is August 16th, and if you are not already participating but would like to join you can find a submission template which contains all the details on our website. There’s been a minor change to the template, with the addition of a new x-code around ‘outcomes met’. Here you’ll be able to say whether you’ve included just those closures where outcomes have been fully met, or whether you are also including partially met.
We’re also running further analysis workshops for both EH and RIIA, on 11th and 25th September respectively. This has become a favourite session to host, as the discussion is so interesting and I always come away with a better understanding of Early Help. Please send me an email if you are interested in attending – all are welcome, whether they have submitted data or not. At the last workshop, I mentioned that it would be good to have a theme to focus on for any spare time we have at the end. If you have any ideas, that would be great – otherwise we’ll pick a topic and let you know nearer the time of the session when we send out the papers.
We’ll be gathering data for both collections for Q1 2024-25 over the coming weeks, and running further sessions to report back – and invite discussion – on the new data as we receive it each quarter. If you’d like to join the list for invitation to future such workshops, please email us.
4. Safeguarding Pressures 9 data request – updated
This year we’ll be supporting ADCS with their “Safeguarding Pressures” report.
ADCS have now circulated their request for both a data return and a survey response, with the deadline of 16th August so that the data return to be completed after your LA signs off its CIN Census return (to avoid disparities in figures published by ADCS and DFE respectively). This is very similar to the return for Safeguarding Pressures 8, with only minor changes to the data request.
Please note: we have noticed a couple of mistakes with the original file we sent out to DCSs, so we issued a revised version on 08/07/2024 which, if it hasn’t reached you, can be accessed from the D2I website at the above link.
5. D2I Annual Report 2024
We’ve published our latest annual report summarising recent work and upcoming priorities. This is a key way for D2I to state its case to colleagues around the country and invite feedback and other input on what we should be doing or how we should be operating. If reading the report inspires any ideas you’d like to share, do get in touch. Everything we do is driven by our understanding of what will be most useful to LAs in improving data work to support vulnerable children, so we rely on colleagues’ input to help keep that understanding accurate. For more detail, use the link above to download the full report.
As always, thanks are due to everyone for continuing to use D2I tools and community spaces, contribute to projects, and provide feedback to keep improving our toolkit.
6. Upcoming events
Early Help data partnership reflective workshops 11th September 12:30 – 14:00
RIIA dataset reflective workshops 5th September 12:30 – 14:00
D2I open house - Next open house: Wednesday 17th July at 13:00
Python workshops – Running weekly on Thursday and Friday afternoons
7. Credits
Credit for recent improvements to our data tools and project work is due to colleagues in:
Department for Education
Research in Practice
ADCS
Oldham
East Sussex
Essex
Wolverhampton
Yorkshire & Humber region
Bristol
Stockton-on-Tees
Derby
Slough
Waltham Forest
Calderdale
East Sussex
Ofsted
Enfield
Herefordshire
North Yorkshire
Essex
Birmingham
That’s it! If you have any comments, queries or ideas that you want to share, just let us know.
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