D2I News for February: Events, events, and also . . . events
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Please find below another bundle of news, within which I hope you’ll find something of interest.
1. Families First Partnership Programme - Data to Insight Support
We're really glad to have helped, through D2I, NVEST, and colleagues, work with DfE to provide systems guidance relating to the Families First Partnership Programme. We've now agreed to continue supporting local authorities with this work as it moves forward, and we're going to work with LA colleagues to ensure that support is as useful as possible.
For these workshops - running initially each Thursdays from 26th February to 26th March - we'll be offering regular support sessions for LAs implementing Families First reforms, where we'll work to understand the impact on performance and reporting, offering helpful advice and facilitating the sharing of best practice.
2. DFJ Trailblazers Deep Dive Series
Working with Mutual Ventures, we’re pleased to invite you to our Data Deep Dive series as part of the Designated Family Judge (DFJ) Trailblazers, designed specifically for Local Authority analysts and data leads.
Whether you’re working directly with pre‑proceedings data or shaping wider performance frameworks, this series is designed to help you get ahead of the changes coming next year.
Workshop 1:
A practical look at the most useful insights from DFJ Trailblazers and what they mean for data design and analysis across LAs.
Workshop 2:
With a new statutory pre-proceedings dataset coming in 26/27, this session explores how DFJ learning can support a more consistent, system‑wide view of court processes.
Both sessions are practical and designed to help analysts get ahead of upcoming changes.
Register here:
We will send out the Teams link to all registered participants.
We look forward to seeing you there.
3. SEND RIIA Quarterly National Dataset
We are making strong progress in shaping the Phase 1 metrics for the SEND RIIA National Dataset. D2I is working closely with regional analysts across all areas to finalise measure definitions and ensure alignment with the upcoming SEND reforms.
We are now seeking Local Authorities with capacity to participate in a pilot submission for 2026 Q1 (January–March).
The Focus Group expects to share the finalised Phase 1 measures by the end of March. If your Local Authority is interested in being part of the pilot, please get in touch.
4. Good SEND data reporting metrics
As part of our ongoing commitment to improving SEND data quality and supporting analysts to share and develop good practice, D2I is seeking local authorities willing to share examples of the SEND performance metrics they report to Heads of Service and DCSs. We are also keen to hear about effective approaches to accessing or linking SEND‑related health data, whether received directly from ICBs or via Public Health. If your LA has developed strong SEND dashboards, performance reports, or health–SEND data flows, we’d love to hear from you. Understanding your processes, challenges and successes will help us shape a shared view of what “good SEND data reporting” looks like nationally.
5. RIIA and EHDP Quarterly Analysis Workshops
We recently restarted our quarterly analysis workshops, providing analysis of the data we collect via the RIIA and Early Help Data Partnership (EHDP) returns. Previously, these workshops were held separately, but with the FFP Programme changes combining EH and CiN into a single workflow, it makes much more sense to look at these returns as reflecting two parts of the same system. These workshops will provide a unique overview of the current EH and CSC landscape, as this is - to our knowledge - the only nationally benchmarked EH dataset available.
The next session will be held on Thursday 14th May 14:00 - 15:30
6. Python sessions
Will is running an intermediate Python course: for people who got on well with the beginner's course or who have done a bit of Python already. It will run Thursdays and Fridays from Feb 26/27th 13:00-15:00. You should have familiarity (but not expertise) with things like pandas, functions, loops, and conditionals before the course. As before, he will run the same session twice in a week to give people a better chance of being able to attend, so you need only attend one session. You do not need Python installed locally in order to access and follow along with the course, but you will need to make a GitHub account and follow the getting set up video: : https://youtu.be/AI2OU8Gs0RQ
The course will go through the processes we might use in a real work environment: getting data in (from SQL or flat files), cleaning it, transforming it and performing calculations, formatting it and outputting it for use in external dashboarding software (e.g. power BI), and some light dashboarding in Python too. By the end of the course, you will have one example Python script that, in one click, goes from data extraction to data outputting. As part of this we’ll look at organising our Python code so that we can re-use code we have already written across Python scripts, and writing tests for our code.
7. DfE’s Early Adopters Daily Data Flows project with Standard Safeguarding Dataset (SSD)
D2I have been working with the pilot local authorities on both phase 1 and now phase 2 of the DfE’s Early Adopters Daily Data Flows project. The project aims to learn from local authorities directly as part of a pilot to enable automated stat returns data flows to the DfE’s Data and Digital project team. It’s an exciting platform to be working with dedicated local authority performance/infrastructure teams of all types, and throughout the shared development journey has initiated a great deal of incidental learning for all involved.
The SSD is at the core of the D2I data flows solution, and can enable local authorities to deploy additional tools, including the API related tooling as an add-on to the SSD schema. With the SSD schema as the standardised middleware layer between CMS and upstream data flows/reporting, LA’s can work collaboratively with others on reporting scripts and additional pipeline tools, or plug-and-play those developed by others. The SSD continues to develop through these and other collaborative efforts towards a shared standard in CSC data. If your LA is not currently part of the DfE EA Project but you think that you might like to find out more, trial deploy or contribute to the SSD, get in touch.
8. Upcoming events
(Next open house: Wednesday 18th March at 13:00)
(Wednesday 4th March at 2pm)
(Next session: Thursday 7th May at 09:30)
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. If you'd like to request a topic for discussion, just let us know.
Separately, we've been supporting the Children's Information Project's work to explore effective and ethical uses of children's information in local authorities. Following the launch of the CIP report last week, our lead officer Alistair Herbert will be joining a panel discussion at the Children's Information Project webinar. The full report is worth a look, but the webinar will open with a presentation discussing the report's findings, followed by response and discussion from participants.
Finally, our platform-agnostic IT systems workshop, branded as the NVEST network, just held a fascinating event with input from colleagues at Ofsted, among others, and will be sharing outputs from that meeting soon. The next event is in May, and we really encourage systems managers, users, and overseers to join that if they can, especially if they have any interest in multi-agency information sharing. You can sign up for updates about NVEST at the link above.
9. Credits
Credit for recent improvements to our data tools and project work is due to colleagues in:
Oldham
East Sussex
Southwark
Enfield
Wandsworth
Bradford Children and Families Trust
London Councils / LIIA
ADCS
Department for Education
Staffordshire
And everyone who attended one of our events in January!
That’s it! If you have any comments, queries or ideas that you want to share, just let us know.
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