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Principles met

  • Innovation

    We will embrace innovation in how we work with local communities to drive positive change.

  • Learning

    We will capture and ‘expand’ the experience and learning from individual projects and approaches in order to encourage broader application of co-operative principles within individual member Councils and across the Network.

  • Walking the talk

    As a membership organisation, we will make this statement of our principles operational by: • Co-operation among members: Our members work together to help each other implement our values, sharing experiences and learning. • Openness of membership: Full, Associate and Affiliate Membership is open to any qualifying Council, organisation or individual who shares our values and is committed to putting them into action. • Co-production of the Network’s work: Members help shape the Network’s work programme and the content of events and written products. • Action-focused: The network is a vehicle for helping councils translate co-operative values and principles into policy and practice. •Membership-based: The network is majority funded by modest membership subscriptions from its member Councils, Associates and Affiliates. •Non-party-political: Members share the belief that working co-operatively within and across communities holds the key to tackling today’s challenges.

Effective data sharing saves lives. Countless high-profile case reviews over the last 20 years, from Baby P to Victorie Climbié, identified information-sharing barriers, whether cultural or technical, as key contributing factors to the tragic outcomes of vulnerable children. Far too often practitioners have missed key information which was needed to make effective safeguarding decisions.

Cardiff Council has delivered an innovative data-sharing solution that ensures social workers and other frontline practitioners have secure access to cross-service and cross-partner information they need to safeguard children. Furthermore, the solution saves practitioners significant time.

Cardiff’s solution employs technology to collate a child’s records from various IT systems across schools, Children’s Services, Education, Youth Justice, Housing, etc., creating a unified ‘Single View’ of their engagement with public services. The Single View tool offers two key functions: 

1. A Single View of a Child, which links together all relevant data sets:

  • An involvement screen, allowing practitioners to see which other professionals are involved with the child, and how to contact them
  • A cross-service chronology, showing significant events, such as an episode of care or an offence committed, against a backdrop of school performance

2. An aggregate view of all service users to support strategic analysis:

  • An aggregated view of service provision allows the identification of trends over time and demand pressures for certain groups of people or certain parts of the city

The solution uses NHS numbers as unique identifiers, allowing the council to match to an individual’s records and bring them together into one place, even if they are held in multiple systems. This has been delivered in-house by a small project team within Cardiff Council, drawing on widely available Microsoft tools.

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