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Brighton and Hove’s Children’s Centres did not have a centralised Management Information System and used NEC’s Children’s Centre Manager (CCM) system to help establish a new, more efficient process. 

Challenge 

Brighton and Hove’s data was managed in an ad-hoc manner, primarily using Excel spreadsheets. This made the production of accurate reports a very labour and time-intensive task.

Like all Children’s Centres teams across the country, Brighton and Hove were facing an ever-increasing dependence on the production of quality information, to demonstrate their impact to Ofsted and to help shape service delivery in the future.

Brighton and Hove also recognised the importance of establishing a robust process around the chosen system, ensuring that all Centres were using it in a uniform way, with a Central Administration team managing core data and producing central reports. 

  • Production of reports are manual and time-consuming 
  • Increased need on production of quality information 
  • Need central management of core data and reporting 

Solution 

Brighton and Hove City Council ran a competitive tendering process in which NEC’s Children’s Centre Manager (CCM) system demonstrated the unique ability to tailor the solution to satisfy their needs. Following the tendering process and contract award, Brighton & Hove worked closely with NEC’s Children’s Centre Manager system to ensure that the implementation of the system was a success and enabled a uniform set of activities to be designed and defined by their associated KPI targets. 

As well as the core functionality around managing families, services and attendances, Case Work and Reporting, Brighton and Hove also purchased two additional modules – Barcoding and Messaging, which allow for time-saving around attendance recording through the implementation of barcoded registers and membership cards. To enable the Centres to identify specific groups and send pertinent messages (e.g. details of the next smoking cessation course to ‘Smoking Parents’) the Text Messaging module has also been implemented. 

Results 

Brighton and Hove’s Children’s Centres’ integration with Health led to information on new births being directly imported into the CCM on a regular basis. This resulted in greater data accuracy, substantial time saving on data input and the ability to easily combine data sets across NHS and Council systems. NEC developed a procedure which handles this upload automatically; skilfully and patiently negotiating the data security protocols of two large, public organisations. 

The solution resulted in standardisation of attendance data across the entire service, which has meant a systematic approach to assessing performance, more confident completion of OFSTED Self Evaluation Forms and better transparency and accountability to the Advisory Groups that govern each centre.

“Moving from our existing attendance management system to NEC’s CCM felt like a daunting task at first, but the confidence, experience and clarity of guidance they offered during the planning stages was exceptional, and the resulting migration was faultless. Following the painless implementation project, the ongoing support was responsive and dedicated. I’m yet to find a problem they can’t solve, and the people are quite nice too!”

Ben Mills, Performance Analyst

Find Out More!

If you would like to find out more about our Children’s Data Management software, contact us here.