Peterborough council integrates social care and education IT

Peterborough city council is working on an integration of its information systems for children's social care and education in an effort to adopt a more collaborative approach to the sectors. It is bringing together Liquidlogic's Protocol integrated children's system with the CapitaOne education system to provide the appropriate staff with information from the different databases. It says this should help to meet its aim of achieving a "single view of the child" and removing any gaps in case files for social workers. Elaine Alexander, the council's head of programme and project management, told GGC it has traditionally used about 20 systems and is aiming to reduce the number to three, also including Capita's One eStart for early years. It began looking in 2008, shelved the project for a couple of years because it would have required a complex project, but that it took a fresh look last year and was more confident that it could work with off-the-shelf solutions. It is now working on linking the systems, with those for education and early years already connected and all three scheduled to come together by autumn 2012. Social care staff will be given access to information on the other systems through Protocol in a 'read only' form, with access controls in place to ensure they only see the appropriate fields. Alexander said the integration is "a huge job and is made more difficult by having to do a huge data cleansing exercise before migrating information to a new system," adding that data on some children could exist on several systems without being exactly the same. "The internal management team is doing the vast majority of the work," she said. "It's a major part of the integration operation in terms of time, investment and resource, but it's no good putting dirty data into a new system." She said the team has also worked with the two suppliers and Serco, the council's ICT partner, on the technical integration. Alexander added: "By integrating our systems we are set up to reduce the risks to vulnerable children both now and in the future, no matter what changes to regulation there may be. To make sure we chose the best system possible, we involved everyone from social workers to senior management in the procurement process. We are confident that we have the most user-friendly system which will act as an enabler for social workers to do their jobs to the best of their ability." This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates of news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here.