D2I core toolkit mini-update, July 2025

We’re just writing with a few updates as we head into the summer holidays.

Here are the headlines:

• We’ve updated the Benchmarking Tool to include the newly released stability measures and a few headline measures from Coram’s ASG adoption data – 3.54 is here.

• We are maintaining a short slide deck summarising our current understanding of the Families First Partnership reforms, which we presented at our last bi-monthly Open House session. We’ll try to keep this updated with all relevant info, so that you can use this as an easy reference point for understanding the reforms.  You can find the document here.

• Chat 9.6 is now live on our website (here) with the following changes:

  • Amended issue with 'child seen alone' not calculating correctly

  • Misc. bug fixes

  • Updated Ofsted inspection outcomes in CustomGroup tab

  • Corrected re-ref donut chart (value was displaying correctly, but chart was not)

  • Amended the way the RIIA tab calculates re-referrals to align with guidance (denom: - children referred in quarter – num: of those, number with a referral in previous 12 months)

  • Added 25-year-olds into the Care leavers by age and eligibility table on page 16

  • Amended issue with adoption timeliness (stage 1 to 3) not showing correctly as excluding children not adopted - A20 remains unaffected (so we now effectively have two measures: stage 1 to 3 all, and A20, stage 1 to 3 (adopted children only)

  • Coram ASG data now used (where available) for adoption benchmarking

The rest of the email are some reflections on the latest release – you won’t miss any vital information from skipping.

While this is a relatively small update, it includes some important changes and bug-fixes that are based entirely on feedback from people using the ChAT every day.

When I first started working in D2I, making changes to ChAT felt intimidating – there is a lot going on in the backend! Over time, with the support of Alistair and the rest of the team, I’ve gained confidence, though I still feel the pressure before pressing the upload button on updates. What helped the most though was when I eventually realised ChAT belongs to the sector.

As a small team, balancing time between maintaining our core tools (ChAT, BmT, etc.) and our commitments on projects that provide funding is an ongoing challenge.  While we make every effort to get things right and test to the best of our ability, some issues only become apparent once the tool is in real-world use. Our ability to test is limited compared to that of 153 Local Authorities who all know their data inside out and can spot things that don’t look right almost instantly. It’s always incredible to me that in the hours and days following a release, we will get emails from people who’ve taken the time to test the new version, spotted something that doesn’t look right and flagged it. In many cases, they even provide a fix (a missing bracket in a formula, for example).

Often the people that write in will open their email with an apology, when we couldn’t be more grateful for their help. The reality is that it’s likely hundreds of people that have contributed to the ChAT now, from the initial creators who had such a brilliant idea and built most of the backend, to each LA who contributes design ideas and bug fixes. From the DfE who provide guidance on changes to stat return templates to lessen the burden on stat return day, to the team at Ofsted who generously give their time to making sure the tool is usable as possible for LAs.

It really is a team effort – and it’s great to work on something that’s been so useful for so many people.  

These are some planned improvements that we’ll be working on over the coming weeks:

• A reduced file size. Using Excel tables, and deleting everything but the top line in each list, we can almost halve the size. However, ensuring formulae pull down correctly remains a challenge (it should just work, but some columns don’t pull down properly, possibly because of the way the cell references are written).

• Separating data into teams/services. This is a request we get often and think it could be really helpful to make the ChAT more usable as a regular performance tool. Our thinking at the moment is that we’ll add an optional extra column on to each list that you can use to add any categories you want, which we’ll then chart up on a separate tab. The complicated bit is turning those lists into data tables as the results will be pretty variable (number of teams etc.)

In the meantime, if you have any ideas (or of course, spot a bug), please drop us a line.

Thanks to everyone who has helped with the tools recently:

Telford

Rutland

West Midlands Commissioning Hub

Brighton & Hove

Solihull

Harrow

Stockton-on-Tees

London Innovation and Improvement Alliance

Ofsted

York

Thurrock

Islington