Data-led improvements for SEND children
DEPARTMENT FOR EDUCATION
The Department for Education (DfE) is a UK Government department responsible for children’s services and education including early years, schools, higher and further education policy, apprenticeships and wider skills in England.
One area of focus is in supporting children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND). Their Vulnerable Children and Families portfolio is responsible for helping disadvantaged children and young people to achieve more.
The challenge
In 2021, the Department of Education introduced The Delivering Better Value in SEND programme, as a way to provide dedicated support and funding to 55 Local Authorities. It wanted to help improve the delivery of SEND services for children and young people whilst also ensuring that the various services are sustainable.
As part of this the Department for Education needed a way to understand how local authorities were achieving good outcomes for students with SEND. They wanted to be able to monitor and draw insights from what was working well across the different authorities and to scale the most helpful activities nationwide in order to help the largest number of people with SEND.
This required a unique system that would need to pull in data from a variety of sources and also work within the Departments’ own operational frameworks. This was a complex service that needed to be carefully developed and then maintained for the foreseeable future.
What we did
After our work with the Department of Education in supporting social workers with their Accreditation service, Register Dynamics were invited back to oversee the delivery of this new platform.
The work to create this system had already begun via a consortium of external software providers and their contract was coming to an end. The DfE needed a technical expert who was familiar with the Departments’ assurance processes and requirements, to assess the software delivered and determine next steps. They wanted to make sure that the software would be delivered as specified and also meet their needs in the future.
Register Dynamics supplied a Director-Level Data and Technical Architect to lead the handover and evolution of the platform. We conducted an in-depth analysis of the specifications and deliverables, working closely with the external providers and the Department’s Senior Leadership. This led to a series of engagements to adapt, extend and then maintain the system in order to meet the needs that arose as it was deployed and adopted.
The service as a whole consisted of data pipelines, various dashboards as well as a wealth of ingested and distilled educational statistics from over 30 datasets. These came from a number of different sources including: Office for National Statistics (ONS), Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED), National Health Service (NHS), NHSX (now the Transformation Directorate at NHS England), data.gov.uk, GOV.UK and the DfE.
We worked with an external partner to help recruit and bring on board a team of Data Engineers and Software Developers, to meet the latest requirements and maintain the service.
We designed a special Case Management System to be integrated into the tool, which allowed the Department of Education to easily work with Local Authorities to understand how they were achieving their outcomes and to see where there were opportunities to replicate them.
We ensured that all of the databases were working properly and integrated seamlessly with Microsoft Power BI. We also adapted the system to work successfully within the Department’s Microsoft Azure tenancy, taking into account all of their specific organisational policies.
The result
The Department of Education continues its efforts to support children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) and we are proud to have been a part of this ongoing mission.
Through our platform, they are able to draw insights in real-time and use this to improve activities offered to SEND children across the UK. This technology supports the ongoing Delivering Better Value in SEND Programme, acting as a source of statistical data for civil servants to act upon. We are excited to see how this progresses.
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