Enabling earlier identification and support for children at risk
Earlier intervention has been proven to improve outcomes for children, linked to better physical health, fewer behavioural problems, and better educational outcomes. But for children who are at risk, intervening earlier can have a far greater impact, reducing the risk of experiencing harm or falling into crisis. Despite this, spending on early intervention has nearly halved since 2010/2011 (£2.2bn in 2022/2023).
The result? The number of children in residential care and almost doubled, and spending on late intervention has rocketed to nearly £10bn a year. Local authorities are footing the biggest portion of the bill, but it is vulnerable children who are bearing the brunt of this shift from prevention to cure. Unfortunately, this looks set to only get worse, with recent projections that by 2032 there will be more than 100,000 children in care, with council spend estimated to reach £15bn a year.
But it doesn’t have to continue this way. If children’s social care teams could easily and automatically identify children as soon as they begin slipping into a vulnerable situation, they could offer preventative support to families and young people before they reach crisis point. This would result in better outcomes for vulnerable children and their families and help to reduce the snowballing costs of late intervention. Currently, this is a heavily manual task that needs collaboration from multi-agency and multi-disciplinary teams. But what if these teams were able to focus time on assessment and intervention, rather than identification?
Introducing – ClearCore Children
That’s why we are launching ClearCore Children, designed to unlock a unique, multi-agency understanding of children that would otherwise be impossible. It not only automates much of the process of identifying children at risk, but it offers a new lens for assessing the importance and meaning of information. With ClearCore Children, children’s social care teams can access a joined-up single view of each child that combines data from across multiple agencies, such as local authorities, police, probation, and GP surgeries. This tool helps local authorities to understand information in its wider context, giving assessments of risk based on a complete picture. This makes it easier to identify vulnerable children earlier and fast-track the right support where it’s needed.
For the first time ever, children’s social care teams can use a complete, data-driven picture of a child’s circumstances to inform service delivery.
Supporting local multi-agency safeguarding objectives
ClearCore Children brings together information from multi-agency safeguarding teams, such as education, social care, police, health, and probation, to develop a more complete, accurate picture of a child’s circumstances. It matches records across all these systems automatically, to create a single source of truth for each child.
Local authorities can tailor the platform to support their existing safeguarding plans. With full user control over matching rules, they can create an early warning system to flag potential children at risk combining data from across all relevant MASH organisations. It’s a sustainable solution to support long term safeguarding and prevention of harm, with audit trails that document every decision point to ensure transparency, accountability and data-driven decision making.
Pamela Cook, Director at Infoshare+ said:
“I’m incredibly proud to launch ClearCore Children. Being able to identify which children are at risk is crucial for targeting support early, which we know has a massive impact on quality of life and long-term outcomes for children – now and way beyond their childhood. Prevention is so much more difficult than cure though, which is why it can be difficult to get the right practical plans in place that are sustainable and don’t overwhelm teams, already working at capacity. ClearCore Children solves that problem, by automating the identification of children at risk, making it easier for children’s social care teams to focus on earlier intervention.
“But by far the biggest impact of ClearCore Children is the unique ability to automatically assess information in a multi-agency context, offering local authorities a new lens to understand and interpret their own data and have confidence to make safeguarding decisions based on real time, joined up information. With the benefit of documented evidence behind every decision, councils can ensure long term costs savings across child social care.”