ClearCore Solution reduces time taken to identify at-risk families from three months to two hours
Nottingham County Council (NCC) has worked with Infoshare to effectively execute the recent Government Troubled Families programme. Under this legislation, which came into effect in 2011, councils are incentivised to identify the families struggling to cope and to find new ways to work with them in the future. Identifying, collating and compiling this data previously took NCC up to three months, but using our ClearCore solution reduced analysis time to two hours.
NCC found that pinpointing the families with the greatest need was taking months of painstaking data processing. The complexity of matching information from varied sources was extremely time consuming. A particular issue was that the last names of many children did not match those of the head of the household.
The council selected our ClearCore solution to automate matching across multiple agency data sources from the police, youth offending service, health, probation service, education and anti-social behaviour registers. The linked information provided increased detection of Troubled Families, resulting in greater access to additional government funds to support them.
Currently, these families are estimated to cost the country £9 billion per year. The Troubled Families Programme was set up in 2011 to help 120,000 troubled families in England turn their lives around by 2015. In return for its support, and reducing the burden of certain families on the public purse, the Council will receive £2.3m during the lifetime of the programme – saving current and future tax-payers’ money.
“Instead of manually checking thousands of pieces of data by hand, we’re now able to sift information much more effectively, taking hours rather than months,” comments Mary Jarrett, manager of Nottinghamshire County Council’s programme of support. “Using ClearCore has enabled us to target families who need help much more quickly than in the past”.
“Families are responding well to our approach which has included offering parenting advice and support; helping families back into education; and making sure families get to appointments and meetings with doctors, school and probation on time,” added Mary.
Successful family intervention reduces the involvement of challenging families in anti-social behaviour by 59%, halves incidents of truancy, exclusion and bad behaviour at school and cuts their involvement in crime by 45%. So identifying the families quickly and accurately is vital.
Read more about ClearCore here
Read more about the Troubled Families Programme here
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