Cambridgeshire

Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC) is the county council of Cambridgeshire, England. It encompasses 5 distinct districts. Population is approximately 859,830 and forecast to rise to 1,044,030 by 2036. It includes some areas of the UK’s fastest population growth outside of London. As of 2016 11% of children lived in low-income households. 17% of children are eligible for free school meals.  

How we solved the problem

Working closely with the CCC Early Years team, Sentinel developed an online Early Years Child Assessment Portal that enabled all Early Years providers to record and share assessments for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and Every Child a Talker (ECaT). This Portal is based upon Sentinel’s Data Integration Platform, it allows data to be integrated to other sources of information available to CCC such as Ofsted provider listings and Early Years Funded children.

We developed an optimised, bespoke system, locally known as CASEY (Cambridgeshire’s Assessment System for Early Years) which facilitates the secure, real-time sharing of information between providers and the authority. 

The benefits of using our data platform

The CASEY system enabled real time sharing of assessment data between early years education providers and authorities. Information is validated at time of entry via the Portal screens, so the levels of data quality and completeness are always high.

The data scope of the system was further extended to incorporate NHS health assessment (ASQ-3) information to provide a more complete picture of pre-school child development and additional portal screens were created for the Council’s Children Centre Management teams to access. This has provided a rich source of information for the CCC team to monitor the progress of children, the relative performance of providers and the overall state of school readiness across the region.

Additional functionality was provided to the Early Years Provider management teams by adding a staff training module. This allows providers to track the levels of qualification across their teams as well as alerting the needs for annual recertifications when they are due. This module provides valuable information for the CCC team to assess the current levels of qualification across their Early Years education provision as well as understanding where additional courses may need to be made available.