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).
ChAT and Benchmarking Tool - social work workforce data
RIIA Quarterly Dataset - Q3 data now available
Early Help Quarterly Dataset – Q3 data now available
Ofsted ILACS results dataset
Publications page on the D2I website
Upcoming events
Early Help data partnership workshops
Next open house
Python workshops
Credits
ChAT and Benchmarking Tool - social work workforce data
Last week DfE published their "Children's social work workforce" dataset, and we’ve updated the Benchmarking Tool accordingly, and pulled these datasets into a new version of the ChAT alongside some other small changes. The workforce data aren't essential to the ChAT, so you may or may not want to jump to the latest version depending on what you make of the change log.
The next release for these tools will probably be April, when the DfE are currently planning to publish their "Outcomes" statistics for CIN and CLA. If you have feedback on this or any other aspect of ChAT/BmT, do let us know.
(3.43) Added SW Workforce 2023 return
(3.42) Added rebased CLA rates (backdated to 2018/19)
(3.42) Added 2023 CLA rate
(3.42) Added rebased CIN Data for 21/22
(3.41) Amended missing SGO as percentage of ceased CLA
(3.41) Amended CLA Net gain figures in Data_all_LAs
(3.41) Amended missing CLA ceasing (16-18) data missing from 20/21 following amendments
(3.41) Added column with ONS mid year 2022 for D2I calculations to Data_all_las and amended any 903 data using 2021
(3.41) Updated population in createcustomgroup
(3.41) Added latest inspection data (1/12/23)
(8.3) Implemented lookups
(8.3) Removed Cumberland & Westmorland & Furness from stat neighbour calculations for other LAs
(8.3) Added workforce data 2023
(8.2) Added amended CLA rates (backdated to 2018/19)
(8.2) Amended CiN 21/22 release data
(8.2) Fixed ChAT monthly chart formatting
(8.2) Fixed RIIA Import Tab not updated LA name
(8.1) Fixed issue with pages 25/26 of ChAT_Report not updating properly.
(8.1) Carried over various bug fixes from BmT v3.41
(8.1) Updated inspection data (current to 1/12/23)
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.
RIIA Quarterly Dataset - Q3 data now available
We've updated the RIIA Quarterly Benchmarking Tool with Q3 data for 2023-24. There are some other minor changes in the notes below.
Updated all hard coded Q2 references to Q3
Corrected LA codes for indicator 20702 for London
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.
Early Help Benchmarking – Q3 data now available
The still-increasing number of LAs (now more than 50) who contribute to our separate Early Help quarterly benchmarking dataset can also now access Q3 data in the Early Help Benchmarking Tool.
Q3 data added & hard coded references updated
We’re also running workshops on Teams to reflect on the collection to date – looking at how the submission process has been, whether the measures are the right ones, and whether clarifications are needed for the definitions. It would be great to get as many people as possible attending. The next session is 13th March 2024, from 11:30 until 13:00.
This collection is open to any LA, and we’ll be collecting Q4 data in April/May. We’re also working to ensure that everyone working at a participating LA has direct access to the tool, but if you need to add more members you can do so by emailing us for help.
Ofsted ILACS results dataset
We know many LAs expend effort keeping up to date with ILACS inspection results as they are published by Ofsted, because they want to review the data more frequently than Ofsted currently publish summary datasets about inspection results.
We're experimenting with a weekly-updated dataset derived from the Ofsted inspection result PDFs, which we currently host here: Ofsted ILACS Summary (data-to-insight.github.io)
At present this is limited to ILACS results, but we are hoping to extend the product over time, so please send feedback, bug reports, or development requests at your convenience.
Publications page on the D2I website
We've done some supporting work on several interesting research reports recently, including through our support to the DfE's Data and Digital Solutions Fund projects, and we're very hopeful that the colleagues who commissioned some of them will be happy to make the end products public. In readiness for that we've added a "Publications" section to the D2I website, and to mark the occasion we've published Will's case study about our work with Social Finance and Wigan Council to develop shared data tools in Python.
We'll hope to share more of this sort of thing soon.
Upcoming events
As mentioned above, John’s running quarterly workshops to reflect on the early help collection.
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 continues to run Python drop-in workshops on Thursday and Friday afternoons. We're currently partway through a "Python for absolute beginners" course which has been amazingly well-attended (over 100 people signed up!), so please bear with us if there's a slight delay in resuming normal "drop-in" service. You can register your interest in future courses here: Technical workshops | Data to Insight
Credits
Credit for recent improvements to our data tools and project work is due to colleagues in:
Cumberland
Westmorland and Furness
Thurrock
Essex
Blackpool
East Sussex
Knowsley
North West ADCS
Hertfordshire
Hull
Hartlepool
Department for Education
Oxfordshire
Cheshire East
Brighter Futures for Children
Bracknell Forest
Medway
Newham
Wigan
York
Bristol
Luton
Hackney
Kirklees
Somerset
Swindon
Waltham Forest
Lincolnshire
Durham
Brighton
Greater Manchester Combined Authority
Dorset
Cornwall
Southampton
London Councils
That’s it! If you have any comments, queries or ideas that you want to share, just let me know, either by email or via our Slack workspace.