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.
Discussion workshops for RIIA quarterly collection and Early Help data partnership
Apprenticeship 2024 cohort
“CSC for Data People” guidance document
Statutory return data tools (Excel)
Statutory return data tools (Web)
ChAT and BmT – minor updates including fostering data
Safeguarding Pressures 9 data collection
Upcoming events
Credits
1. Discussion workshops for RIIA quarterly collection and Early Help data partnership
The deadlines are approaching for Q4 returns to the RIIA quarterly collection and the Early Help quarterly collection, and I wanted to make sure you’re aware that we’re now also running discussion workshops to help colleagues get value from these collections and discuss their use of the data. We held a first workshop for the Early Help dataset last quarter and it got great feedback from attendees about how useful it had been to compare notes, so this quarter we’re doing a separate session for the RIIA dataset as well. Email us to request an invitation to either session.
Early Help data partnership reflective workshops (12th June 12:30 – 14:00)
RIIA dataset reflective workshops (19th June 12:30 – 14:00)
Each session will be supplemented with a brief national data summary report which we’ll share on the website after the session takes place.
2. Apprenticeship 2024 cohort
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. Key dates:
Applications open: 5th July 2024
Briefing session for potential applicants and/or managers: 11th July 2024
Briefing session for potential applicants and/or managers: 18th July 2024
Applications close: 13th September 2024
Learning commences: 31st October 2024
Our hope is that by providing more notice, and a longer application period, we can avoid the rush that some colleagues have had to prepare an application, and work around any summer absences which may be a factor. You can join the Corndel mailing list at the above link, or email us if you’d like to register for either briefing session right now. We’ll write again before the briefing sessions, to highlight this information closer to the time.
3. “CSC for Data People” guidance document
The world of CSC data can be confusing, even for those of us who have been involved in the work for a long time, and we’ve been thinking about ways to make the system easier to understand, and help provide a frame of reference for newer colleagues or those on the edges of what we do – corporate managers, business support, etc.
"CSC for Data People" is our beginner's guide to the systems, stakeholders, common practice, and necessary knowledge for data professionals working in the sector. It’s an open document featuring contributions from a number of colleagues across different LAs and Ofsted, and it splits roughly into two halves: the first provides a guided tour through the most important elements of working with data in support of CSC, and the second provides a bundle of resources and reference information.
As with all our work, feedback and suggestions for future revisions is very welcome!
4. Statutory return data tools (Excel)
The Excel tools for helping with the statutory return process are now updated for use with this year’s returns. The update mostly consists of including the most recent published data for reference purposes. If you spot any further changes that would be useful, please do let us know – we’re not directly involved in submitting statutory returns within the D2I team, so designing and troubleshooting new features can be especially tricky with these tools!
5. Statutory return data tools (Web)
The web-based tools for assisting with in-year data validation against the SSDA903 and CIN Census datasets are both now updated in line with this year’s data specifications. You can use these to support error-checking cycles while submitting returns, but these are especially worth a look once you’ve finished your data validation for this year’s returns – they’ll be available all year round, performing the same validation checks as the DfE sites perform, allowing you to keep on top of data quality for the statutory returns and minimise the workload during return season next year.
6. ChAT and BmT – minor updates including fostering data
We’ve updated the Benchmarking Tool and ChAT to include last November’s fostering dataset publication, which we sadly neglected at the time of release. There are also some other minor fixes in both tools.
(3.45) Added Fostering in England 2023
(3.44) Added Outcomes for CIN including CLA data 2023
(3.44) Added latest inspection data (15/04/2024)
(8.6) Added Fostering in England 2023
(8.6) Minor bug fixes and lookups
(8.5) Amended issues with RIIA data import mixing up SN/Eng values for assessment rate & timeliness
As always, if you spot anything amiss, or have ideas for how to further improve this or any of our tools, please do get in touch.
7. Safeguarding Pressures 9 data collection
This year we’ll be supporting ADCS with their “Safeguarding Pressures” report.
Following the model of previous collections, ADCS will circulate a request for both a data return and a survey response, with 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 will be very similar to the return for Safeguarding Pressures 8, with only minor changes to the data request.
8. Upcoming events
Early Help data partnership reflective workshops (12th June 12:30 – 14:00)
RIIA dataset reflective workshops (19th June 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)
As mentioned above, we're running quarterly workshops to reflect on the early help collection, and separately on the RIIA quarterly dataset.
Our “open house” meeting is a regular chance to drop in on a D2I team meeting where we share what we’re working on and talk about how best to help with data work. We try to cover a mix of “technical” and other work. We don’t yet have an agenda for the March session, so if you have particular requests, do let us know.
And separately, we continue to run Python drop-in workshops on Thursday and Friday afternoons, covering a range of subjects advertised in advance. We’ll also be running another “Python for beginners” course later in the year, for which we’ve had some fantastic feedback, so if you’re an absolute beginner you can sign up to hear about that at this link: Technical workshops | Data to Insight
9. Credits
Credit for recent improvements to our data tools and project work is due to colleagues in:
City of York
Bristol
Stockton-on-Tees
Derby
Slough
Waltham Forest
Calderdale
East Sussex
Ofsted
Enfield
Herefordshire
North Yorkshire
Essex
Blackpool
Wolverhampton
ADCS
That’s it! If you have any comments, queries or ideas that you want to share, just let us know.
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