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.
RIIA and EH Q1 analysis and revised benchmarking tools
Standard Safeguarding Dataset (SSD) – final report, and call for volunteers
Mailing list spring cleaning
Ofsted inspection summaries
Early Help Slack discussion space
Upcoming events
Early Help data partnership workshops
RIIA dataset reflective workshops
Next open house
Python workshops
Credits
RIIA and EH Q1 analysis and revised benchmarking tools
Our briefing sessions last month on Q1 of the RIIA and Early Help data collections were well-attended and apparently very useful for people who came. Once again, 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.
We've also updated the benchmarking tools for both collections with some minor amendments from individual LAs, so you can download a fresh copy using the above links should you so wish. These changes will of course also fold into the next quarterly releases of the tools, following our next collection which, as we said goodbye to September last week, we know people will soon be working on.
We’ll be gathering data for both collections for Q2 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.
Standard Safeguarding Dataset (SSD) – final report, and call for volunteers
We submitted our “final report” on our Standard Safeguarding Dataset to the DfE some months ago… and then there was an election, and we are now back near the point of being able to share it with a wider audience alongside others from the DfE’s Data and Digital Solutions Fund. This doesn’t mean the project is over – we’re still working – but it’s a milestone which we’re excited to achieve, and I’ll hopefully be in touch about that soon. A broader, LA-designed standard dataset for CSC has been a dream for me since before D2I opened its doors, and it feels like this project may yet get us there.
In the meantime, consultation, Design and Development work towards the Standard Safeguarding Dataset (SSD) project has continued this month. We’ve been able to better optimise the project approach as a result of ongoing feedback from colleagues; importantly those now working directly with the structure(incl. in Live) and those considering the SSD into new local development and reporting work, including PowerBI and ongoing data infrastructure decisions. Conversations with LA colleagues and developments in this current phase continue to be insightful and critical to being able to offer LA’s the SSD in a form that can scale-up for all. We’re grateful for your input.
Local Authority data teams are trialling their compatibility against the current SSD extract scripts for the larger market share CMS providers, and we welcome more LA colleagues interested in helping test for System C and Access/Mosaic. We also have ongoing development in the pipeline for those local authorities running Eclipse, and would welcome contact from LA teams who’d like to share feedback toward this. Likewise if you’re running another CMS system (Azeus, CareDirector) and would like to discuss|register your interest in deployment when we have additional compatible versions, do contact us on the D2I email.
For more information, email us.
Mailing list spring cleaning
I get a significant number of returned emails when sending out these newsletters, and it’s not always obvious from the error messages whether these are the result of email addresses no longer existing, or if email servers for particular organisations (my own included) might be choosing to reject the newsletter emails for other reasons.
When time allows over the coming weeks, we’re going to do some out-of-season spring cleaning. Where we can tell from these automatic replies that the addressee’s email address no longer exists, we’ll be deleting these from the mailing list and website membership over the coming weeks. Where we’re unsure, we’ll think of a way to check in before taking action. In the meantime, if you know of colleagues who may not be receiving the emails and think they should, please let us know and we’ll look into what might be going wrong.
I always publish a slightly sanitised copy of the newsletter to Blog | Data to Insight shortly after sending out the emails, so you can always check there to see if you think you’ve missed one.
Ofsted inspection summaries
We maintain an ILACS inspections tool for local authorities that provides a weekly updated summary of all inspection reports. Feedback from colleagues suggested that access to a similar SEND inspections overview would also be useful; as such we have recently developed and hope that colleagues can make use of both the SEND and JTAI inspections summary tools, also updated weekly. Both tools currently as Alpha versions, and your feedback and comments are welcomed.
We’re grateful to colleagues from London Councils who have already fed back into these Alpha versions of the tools, as well as developing some really interesting BI dashboarding. We’d like to develop this further and welcome further critical observations/feedback from all colleagues. For example, we’re currently looking into how to better collapse the JTAI summary columns.
You can send us feedback by email – we're also happy to meet and discuss the tool with anyone who’d find that useful.
Early Help Slack discussion space
At the last Early Help analysis session, we talked about setting up a Slack channel as a place for EH analysts to (virtually) meet and share their knowledge. We’ve now done this and we’d welcome any interested LA colleagues to join our Slack workspace and then join the early-help channel.
Upcoming events
Early Help data partnership reflective workshops (18th December 12:30 – 14:00)
RIIA dataset reflective workshops (TBC)
D2I open house / core tools workshops (Next open house: Wednesday 20th November 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. Please drop us an email if you’d like to attend.
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. For more information, please email us – 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
Credits
Be warned that our credits for this newsletter are even longer than usual, because among other things they include the LAs who contributed to our ongoing analysis for Safeguarding Pressures 9! We know how much effort went into this for the people completing it, so want to acknowledge that here. The report is going to be more useful for the sector because of that effort.
So, credit for recent improvements to our data tools and project work is due to colleagues in:
Barnet
Barnsley
Bath and North East Somerset
Bedford Borough
Bexley
Birmingham
Blackburn with Darwen
Blackpool
Bolton
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole
Bracknell Forest
Bradford
Brent
Bristol, City of
Bromley
Buckinghamshire
Calderdale
Cambridgeshire
Camden
Central Bedfordshire
City of London
Cornwall
Coventry
Derby
Derbyshire
Devon
Doncaster
Dorset
Dudley
Durham
Ealing
East Riding of Yorkshire
East Sussex
Enfield
Essex
Gateshead
Greenwich
Hackney
Halton
Hammersmith and Fulham
Hampshire
Haringey
Harrow
Hartlepool
Havering
Hounslow
Isle of Wight
Islington
Kensington and Chelsea
Kent
Kingston Upon Hull
Kingston upon Thames
Kirklees
Leeds
Leicester
Leicestershire
Lincolnshire
Luton
Manchester
Medway
Merton
Middlesbrough
Newcastle upon Tyne
Norfolk
North East Lincolnshire
North Lincolnshire
North Somerset
North Tyneside
North Yorkshire
Northamptonshire
Northumberland
Nottingham
Nottinghamshire
Oldham
Oxfordshire
Peterborough
Plymouth
Portsmouth
Reading
Redcar and Cleveland
Richmond upon Thames
Rochdale
Rotherham
Salford
Sandwell
Sheffield
Shropshire
Slough
Solihull
Somerset
South Gloucestershire
Southampton
Southend-on-Sea
St. Helens
Staffordshire
Stockport
Stockton-on-Tees
Stoke-on-Trent
Suffolk
Sunderland
Surrey
Sutton
Tameside
Thurrock
Torbay
Tower Hamlets
Trafford
Wakefield
Walsall
Waltham Forest
Wandsworth
Warrington
Warwickshire
West Berkshire
West Sussex
Westminster
Wigan
Wiltshire
Windsor and Maidenhead
Wirral
Wokingham
Wolverhampton
Worcestershire
York
And
Department for Education
Research in Practice
ADCS
Ofsted
Enfield
Social Finance
Become
National Children’s Bureau
That’s it! If you have any comments, queries or ideas that you want to share, just let us know.
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