Supporting Families Programme Solution

Our Supporting Families Solution has been specifically designed to meet the requirements of the Supporting Families Programme Phase 3 and help identify and support vulnerable families.

We create a new, unified and profiled dataset of all individuals and families across each client’s region.

Our innovative software quickly and easily transforms the quality and breadth of data at your disposal, without the need for a costly and intrusive transformational project. It also enables individual teams to set and automatically apply discretionary criteria so they can identify families that require support.

Identifying those families who need help and support to turn their lives around is challenging for local authorities and their partner agencies.

The most immediate problem is inaccurate, fragmented data, with incomplete or inconsistent information failing to present a clear picture. Targets could be missed and stretched resources misdirected. Critically, those families who need help the most, may not receive it.

Sentinel’s Supporting Family Data Platform is successfully enabling local authorities to overcome these issues, transforming their programmes and driving earlier, appropriate intervention.

Our software matches and integrates data from all available sources to provide up-to-date, holistic and user-friendly records of individuals and family units. The data sharing features of the platform also facilitate collaborative and proactive working.

Fully configurable, it puts you in control of setting profiling criteria and the scenarios that trigger automatic alerts – so you can deliver the interventions that families need and can benefit from.

Developed to meet the evolving requirements of the Supporting Families Programme (previously Troubled Families), our agile solution helps our clients conform to the Data Maturity Model while enabling them to look ahead and respond to future Government initiatives.

Supporting Families Programme Background and Next Phase 2022-2025

The Supporting Families Programme is administered by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (or DLUHC, formerly the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG)).

Click here to view the latest updates from DLUHC about the Supporting Families Programme 2022-2025.

The original Troubled Families Programme was the first national, systematic approach to driving real change in outcomes for families with multiple problems and to change the services that worked with them. Under this programme, each local authority was assigned a target number of families to identify, work with and support.

The challenge for local authorities was to identify eligible families. By its very nature, the programme’s aim to improve outcomes for families with multiple problems means that working and support provision needs encompass multiple teams and partner agencies, with data being collected and managed in a huge number of different systems and databases.

Information needs to be collected multiple data sources, matched together to form a complete view of every family member, and then rolled up into family compositions. These family compositions then need to be profiled to assess their levels of need and confirm if these needs match the requirements defined by the National Outcomes Framework of the programme. For families that do qualify for the programme, continual monitoring of their needs and progress is required to measure progress and outcomes.

Local authorities must evidence the turn-around of families they identify and support and need the ability to track their journey and show the progress they make. This evidencing needed to incorporate information from all supporting services and partners, such as social care, schools, NHS and Police records. Without this evidencing a local authority cannot receive their funding by proving their progress for Outcomes claims.

In April 2022 the next phase of the Supporting Families Programme was released, coming into effect from October 2022. In the 2021 Budget and Spending Round an additional £200 million investment was announced to expand the programme. This represents around a 40% real-terms uplift in funding for the programme by 2024-25, taking total planned investment across the next three years to £695 million.

This new phase of the programme has two key objectives:

•  To see vulnerable families thrive, building their resilience by providing effective, whole family support to help prevent escalation into statutory services
• To drive system change locally and nationally, working with local authorities and their partners to create joined up local services, able to identify families in need, provide the right support at the right time, and track their outcomes in the long term

How our Supporting Families Platform will help

• All information collated in one central place.
  It can be challenging to pull together vital information on families when you are dealing with so many different data sources. Our solution automatically collects information from any structured data source, including your own systems, standalone databases, and those of partner agencies such as the police, NHS, DWP (Department of Work & Pensions) and housing associations and collates it in one central place.
• Automated DLUHC returns and detailed reports.
  For many local authorities producing the DLUHC Returns is a manual and time-consuming task, with a substantial risk of errors.  Our Supporting Families Solution provides an automated answer to all your DLUHC return requirements. With one click you can produce any required submissions or reports. All such outputs can be viewed on screen for initial verification, and then downloaded locally to be sent on at your convenience.
• The information collected in the Supporting Family Platform becomes the most complete and quality-controlled data available.
  The quality and accuracy of the data you work with can vary significantly. Our solution enables you to set your own configurable rules for validating, profiling, and cleansing incoming information while also identifying poor data sources.
• Controlled Data Matching.
  Matching data can be challenging. It is often a manual process involving many iterations of spreadsheet or database functions. With our Supporting Families Solution merging is also controlled by configurable rules within the Platform. These can be set up to automatically carry out merges where there is a confident match. Alternatively, the system can be used to identify potential merges, even where there is misspelling, mistyping or deliberate attempts to deceive. You can review the proposals and decide whether to accept or reject the merge. The Platform will remember your merging decision for future processing, so you do not need to review each time.
  
  In addition, the Platform will learn from local information you add. Providing information on known twins, common names, and common addresses (such as hostels and temporary B&B accommodation) can be used to assess the confidence on potential merges to help you decide.
• Data Protection by Design approach includes full audit trails for every merge or proposed merge.
  All our solutions are built on a ‘Data Protection by Design’ approach. This means that there is a full audit trail available for every merge or proposed merge carried out within the Platform.
• Remove risk and save time: Consistent and robust sets of decisions applied automatically to every new record.
  Because manual processes carry a risk of errors, organisations often spend a lot of time trying to check results. There are better ways to monitor and check results. After spending some valuable time with us during the implementation phase to set up, test and adjust rules (we provide a standard set to get you started), you will know what rules exist and what results to expect. With these in place you have a consistent and robust set of decisions that will be applied automatically to every new record.
• Up-to-date and accurate lists of all families that have crossed eligibility thresholds.
  Individual records are merged to form a single holistic view for each family member and then linked together to create family units. This is done automatically each night, or every time you receive new data.
  
  As a result, our solution has all the key information available across the family and can compare this against the threshold criteria that you set. The results of this comparison are presented to you daily, giving your team an up-to-date list of all the families that have crossed the eligibility threshold.
• Remove the need for manual efforts.
  Our solution removes the manual effort required to collect, analyse, and merge people and family information. Instead, it is all done automatically, based on the business rules you define.
• Support your Family Outcome claims by seeing exactly what have been provided and the outcomes achieved.
  Often, an organisation’s merging processes are focused on trying to bring people’s data together but cannot always capture the outcomes of families for claims or understand which types of intervention / support activities are proving most successful. Our solution can collect and combine any information you want to include, for example all key events and outcomes from front line systems and data collected directly via on-line forms, to build up a full chronology of activities against a family. To support outcomes claims you can also see exactly what support a family has received and the outcomes achieved. Finally, you can report on outcomes against the various activity types to review effectiveness across your Supporting Families programme.

As events like a school exclusion, domestic violence conviction or health concern are collected, the Platform will notify you that the family needs to be assessed. It will also show you the full chronology of events relating to each individual family member that led to the family crossing the threshold.

Data is combined into holistic views of each person and each person is linked into family units. Other links can also be added and managed such as extended families (adults with children linked to different partners and properties) or gang membership (provided by youth offending system).

A second click enables users to drill down further so they can view details of any family member and the current and historical information that is known about them. It is also possible to see if the issues are new or re-occurring and whether the family has already been a part of your Supporting Families / Troubled Families programme before.

Once you decide to accept or reject a family onto your Supporting Families programme, the solution will keep an audit trail of the decision and allow you to enter additional information to support the decision.

Supporting Families Solution and Data Security

• All data collected by our Platform is protected by default and can be fully encrypted
• Standard users never see, or gain access to, the central Platform. Instead, they view individually configured portal screens
• Portal screens can be set up to issue alerts and warnings, without revealing potentially confidential source data
• All data access history is logged by the Sentinel Portal enabling clients to track which records have been viewed, any amendments that have been made and when new records have been created
• No data is downloaded or stored on remote devices. Instead, it is held centrally within the Data Platform
• Like all our solutions, the Supporting Families Solution and Sentinel Platform can be easily integrated, either with existing IT networks or a secure cloud that is hosted remotely
• We offer IL2-equivalent hosted environments for standard personal data solutions and IL3-equivalent for our more sensitive solutions. Where our solutions are hosted, to ensure that all data protection obligations are met, we use accredited partners who are part of the G-Cloud framework

Ministry of Justice (MoJ) Turnaround Scheme

In May 2022 the Moj announced £300 million to cut youth crime over the next three years and make streets safer, the biggest funding package in a generation to tackle youth offending and cut crime.

Part of this initiative is the new £60 million “Turnaround” early intervention programme which will support up to 20,000 more children in England and Wales.

• Local authorities will be given specific cash to intervene early with teenagers displaying signs such as poor school attendance, troubles at home, and a history of substance abuse which are known to be factors which often drive young people into crime – so they can steer them away from law-breaking before an offence is even committed.
• Through ‘Turnaround’, a new early intervention scheme backed by £60 million, local Youth Offending Teams will be given extra funding to connect children and teenagers to targeted, wraparound support to stop them going down a path of criminality.
• This could include mentoring, extra school tuition, sports clubs, help to address any issues at school or at home, with their mental health or with substance misuse, tackling the root causes of their behaviour and helping them to get their lives back on track.”

It is estimated that the Turnaround programme will reach up to 20,000 more children over three years who would not otherwise have received support to turn away from offending.

Our Solution

Our secure, controlled, data-sharing technology is perfectly suited to supporting the Turnaround Early Intervention Programme.
 
Our software is flexible and easy to implement. Views can be tailored to meet the data requirements of specific teams and partner agencies.

Features and benefits include:

• The ability to integrate data from multiple systems, consolidating information to provide a single view highlighting those at risk or in need of intervention
• Profiling functionality to help identify and prioritise teenagers most in need of targeted wraparound support the Turnaround scheme offers.
• No automated profiling or decision making, you control the results of profiling
• Allows informed decisions to be made by professionals with the right expertise and qualitative case knowledge
• Empowers organisations to be pro-active and data-driven, supporting early intervention, action and effective wraparound support service provision
• Provides a complete chronology to the records that make up a person’s history – providing a complete view of a young person’s background and previous challenges, ensuring intervention decisions are timely and appropriate for their needs.
• By providing a single, most accurate and most up-to-date view of young persons’ histories and current contexts, time spent by staff finding out what’s already known is massively reduced. Freeing up staff time to focus case needs and make a difference in young persons’ lives.
• Reveals themes and trends, enabling potential issues to be identified at an early stage and tackled before they reach crisis point
• Highlights links and associations – including family connections or shared history such as gang membership or youth offending
• Additional security and access restrictions can be applied to sensitive personal data, providing a compliant and appropriate visibility across teams and partner agencies.