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.
RIIA Quarterly – 2023-24 collection update
Early Help Data Partnership – 2023-24 collection tool
ChAT and BMt – minor updates
SSDA903 Predictor (Excel) – minor updates
Upcoming open house – all things Standard Safeguarding Dataset
Credits
1. RIIA Quarterly – 2023-24 collection update
We’ve consulted with colleagues across LAs, the NPIMG group of LA regional performance leads, DfE and ADCS, and arrived at some very minor tweaks to the RIIA Quarterly collection for the new reporting year. As such we have updated the collection template hosted on the website.
- New “CIN plans” measure, aligned to CIN census calculations, optional for initial quarters while LAs adapt reporting
- Altered "Care leavers" and "UASC Care leavers" measures to align to DfE SSDA903 cohort
- Clarified “SEND/EHC plans” measure definition, to make clear that this is counting initial plans issued, not including annual revisions of ongoing plans
- Clarified “SW Vacancies” measure definition, to acknowledge that this can include vacancies currently filled by agency, and acknowledge differences in LA reporting practice for these measures
This is for Q1 reporting for 2023-24; definitions for Q4 2022-23 remain unchanged. Some regions use localised collection templates so regional co-ordinators will need to update those appropriately, and LAs in those regions should continue to use those localised templates.
2. Early Help Data Partnership – 2023-24 collection tool
We’re excited to finally launch our Early Help Data Partnership quarterly collection, commencing at the end of Q1 this year. This voluntary collection will allow those local authorities providing data, and only those LAs, access to an Early Help focused benchmarking tool.
This is similar to the RIIA quarterly collection, focusing on 9 key EH benchmarking measures, as well as a small number of contextual questions. We appreciate Early Help looks different in each local authority and the measures may not be an exact fit – but through lots of consultation and collaboration, we’ve tried to find measures that would be the best fit for the most authorities. We’re open to iterating on this process and the measures, so welcome feedback and notes – either via email or within the notes section of the collection tool itself.
This collection is open to any LA – not just our original partners for developing the project – and the deadline for submissions is Friday 11th August.
3. Chat and BMt – minor updates
We missed the annual fostering dataset publication a few months ago, so we’re taking this opportunity to share updated copies of the ChAT and Benchmarking Tool including some other minor fixes, too.
There are a couple of other small tweaks noted in the change log. If you spot anything which looks wrong please let us know by email.
Benchmarking Tool:
· (3.33) Added fostering dataset publication
· (3.33) Updated Ofsted judgements
· (3.32) Fixes to some KS2 CLA education and exclusions calculations
· (3.31) Added Outcomes for CIN including CLA data 2021-22
ChAT:
(7.06) Added fostering dataset publication
(7.06) Updated Ofsted judgements
(7.06) Amended RIIA calcs to have a quarter end date
(7.06) Minor fixes
(7.05) Added Outcomes for CIN including CLA data 2021-22
(7.05) various small bug fixes
4. 903 Excel tool – minor update
These tools have been updated ready to use as part of statutory return sign-off processes this year. We’ve just shared a minor update to the 903 tool to address an issue with the new care leaver cohort definition. Do let us know if you spot anything else untoward – as we’re not actively involved in supporting any statutory returns ourselves, we sometimes need a bit of feedback to help us catch everything, but we think we’re now up to speed with recent changes.
5. Upcoming open house – all things Standard Safeguarding Dataset
Next open house: Wednesday 17/05/2023 at 13:00
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. This time we’ll run through what our user research seems to say about data work in LAs across the country, how we generated effective charts to visualise the larger scale data, and where our thoughts are leading about how to structure the dataset definition.
We’re helping develop a new “standard safeguarding dataset” in a national DfE-backed project led by Hertfordshire, Essex, Knowsley, the regional groups for London and the North West, and us in D2I. We’ve completed initial user research and are starting to grapple with how to define the new dataset. This feels like a good time to gather thoughts across the whole team and if you’d be interesting in joining us, we’d be very glad to get your input too.
As well as the open house, we’re also doing monthly show-and-tell sessions for the project, hosted by colleagues at the DfE. If you’d like to attend either this open house or those show-and-tells, please email and we’ll forward on the relevant invitation(s).
6. Credits
Credit for recent improvements to our data tools and project work is due to colleagues in:
Brighton & Hove
Sheffield
Derby
Stoke
Wolverhampton
Waltham Forest
Durham
Stockton
Hertfordshire
Rochdale
South Tyneside
East Sussex
Southwark
Cornwall
DFE
Ofsted
Manchester
Essex
Trafford
ADCS
Coram
University of Sussex
Newham
LiquidLogic
ADCS North West
London Councils
Social Finance
That’s it! If you have any comments, queries or ideas that you want to share, just let us know.