Investigating and addressing the challenges families and carers have in accessing support services both in person and online, supporting the introduction of the Family Hubs government initiative.
Since 2022 Talent Consulting has been working with the Department for Education on their Vulnerable Children and Families portfolio.
Recently, we've been working on the Government Family Hubs initiative and Start for Life programme, Their objective is to join up and enhance services delivered through transformed family hubs in local authority areas, ensuring all parents and carers can access the support they need when they need it.
The impact of putting users first
Talent Consulting successfully delivered a national service directory for Children and Family Services, with the capacity to list all local authority services and Family Hubs for use by citizens across England.
The system has intuitive search and filter functionality for public users which has made it fast and easy for them to access relevant services based on their wide ranging and unique needs.
The platform also holds information on services provided by the Voluntary and Community sector and gives professionals the ability to make an on-system referral for a child or family.
Services are added and managed by approved users within local authorities which aligns with the design framework for government services.
Understanding user needs
User research showed that it is difficult for families to know what support services are available to them through their local authority and where to get support. This lack of early access was resulting in families potentially moving into crisis and needing the social services intervention.
Our project was the development of an online service which helps families quickly and easily search for and find local authority services and Family Hubs in their area for any given need.
This early intervention aiming to ultimately reduce the burden on Children and Family social workers.
Find out more about our approach to user centric design
The data challenge
One of our biggest challenges was to create consistency across wildly differing data sets held within local authorities. Whilst some LA’s had developed platforms for managing and sharing this data already, some relied on bespoke websites (API’s) whilst others only had leaflets or flyers in doctors' surgeries or public areas.
We needed to create the ability to import, store and maintain the data and display it to users in a consistent and comparable way according to their search criteria/needs. We also needed to make it simple for local authorities to maintain so that they only had to enter the data once in any one platform.
Our business analysts worked with pilot local authorities and undertook wider desk research across a large sub section of other local authorities to understand the structure of the data and the various categories and subcategories used.
They worked closely with the UCD team to understand user needs and how they wanted to interact with the data. They also worked with the technical team to ensure that the result was a consistent data model which worked both technically and for local authorities.
Integration of Technical Solutions
A digital service to facilitate fast access to necessary services for vulnerable children and families.
Department for Education
Open Referral framework was the solution
A solution to the problem was to use the Open Referral framework as a vehicle for standardising the sharing of data. Talent, engaged with the DfE in the open referral community helping shape the future vision of the framework and working together with its sponsors.
This framework defines standards for sharing data over API’s and also the structure of that data, allowing anyone to consume it in a known format.
API approach
The result of this was to develop our own API using this Open Referral standard, with the following advantages:
-
LA’s who have no platform can enter their data in the national database AND then can pull their data into a platform of their choice, when needed.
-
LA’s who already have a platform can allow the service directory to PULL their Local data into the national database.
The API functionality utilising the Open Referral standard significantly reduces the admin burden on local authorities resulting in the need for them to only enter data once into a platform of their choice.
Our services
The data challenge
One of our biggest challenges was to create consistency across wildly differing data sets held within local authorities. Whilst some LA’s had developed platforms for managing and sharing this data already, some relied on bespoke websites (API’s) whilst others only had leaflets or flyers in doctors' surgeries or public areas.
We needed to create the ability to import, store and maintain the data and display it to users in a consistent and comparable way according to their search criteria/needs. We also needed to make it simple for local authorities to maintain so that they only had to enter the data once in any one platform.
Our business analysts worked with pilot local authorities and undertook wider desk research across a large sub section of other local authorities to understand the structure of the data and the various categories and subcategories used.
They worked closely with the UCD team to understand user needs and how they wanted to interact with the data. They also worked with the technical team to ensure that the result was a consistent data model which worked both technically and for local authorities.
The impact of putting users first
Talent Consulting successfully delivered a national service directory for Children and Family Services, with the capacity to list all local authority services and Family Hubs for use by citizens across England.
The system has intuitive search and filter functionality for public users which has made it fast and easy for them to access relevant services based on their wide ranging and unique needs.
The platform also holds information on services provided by the Voluntary and Community sector and gives professionals the ability to make an on-system referral for a child or family.
Services are added and managed by approved users within local authorities which aligns with the design framework for government services.
Open Referral framework was the solution
A solution to the problem was to use the Open Referral framework as a vehicle for standardising the sharing of data. Talent, engaged with the DfE in the open referral community helping shape the future vision of the framework and working together with its sponsors.
This framework defines standards for sharing data over API’s and also the structure of that data, allowing anyone to consume it in a known format.
API approach
The result of this was to develop our own API using this Open Referral standard, with the following advantages:
-
LA’s who have no platform can enter their data in the national database AND then can pull their data into a platform of their choice, when needed.
-
LA’s who already have a platform can allow the service directory to PULL their Local data into the national database.
The API functionality utilising the Open Referral standard significantly reduces the admin burden on local authorities resulting in the need for them to only enter data once into a platform of their choice.