Briefly describe the initiative/ project/service; please include your aims and objectives

Drawing together and extending a series of collaborations between GMCA, Data to Insight, the South East region, the East of England, London Councils, MHCLG, the DfE, and non-profit Social Finance, we implemented a common solution for secure regional data sharing, minimisation, and analysis.

The platform is now in place in four regions, with scope to welcome new partners, and supports a range of purposes. In the Greater Manchester area, GMCA’s member LAs now use this safe, secure, and flexible data platform to quickly and non-disclosively share sensitive data for analysis and forecasting, and to generate crucial insight for addressing some of our member LAs’ most pressing challenges relating to looking after children in our care.

The platform combines robust and flexible architecture with a data sharing protocol to match, enabling LAs to govern how their data is used, and to work together to develop new use cases over time with minimal additional administration. It maximises the value of national standard datasets by using these as vehicles for rapid alignment of data from varied organisations, and produces common outputs which any participating region can easily adopt.

What are the key achievements?

The platform has helped two regions deliver on creating the country’s first two Regional Care Co-operatives. The scale of the collaboration enables us to provide cost-effective maintenance and to share new development work to ensure the platform improves over time. As a partnership, we benefit from:

– Regular, secure data collection and processing from member LAs

– Integration with our open-source demand modelling tool, to support the work of regional care co-operatives in improving services and homes for children in care

– Alignment of new, open-source, standards-informed technical architecture for multiple LAs with a robust and flexible data sharing protocol approved by all member LAs

– New analysis informing regional sufficiency strategies in multiple regions

– Engagement with other regions to support their journeys towards better regional data work

– Potential to extend and customise within individual regions or across the partnership, with identified purposes including SEND provision analysis, Social Work Workforce analysis, and timely cross-regional analysis and information sharing.

The common code-base has now been adopted in four regions, with support from delivery partner Social Finance, and is open to new partners.

How Innovative is your initiative?

Our approach avoids costly software licensing and vendor lock-in, while also providing scope to extend over time to re-use the same core infrastructure across multiple use cases. It improves our local analytical capabilities and provides us significantly better datasets to inform key decisions.

– An open, extensible platform which solves today’s key challenge while providing scope to extend to new use cases over time

– Low-cost implementation based on free, open-source code developed over a series of collaborations between GMCA, the South East region, the East of England, and London Councils

– Cross-regional governance collaboration to manage the platform into the future

– Automated data minimisation technology, combined with a bespoke data sharing protocol to make adoption easy and governance effective

We believe that cross-regional collaboration, and working at regional scale to support local authorities, can develop novel, high-value approaches to shared challenges. Our regional data platform is a new way of enabling those goals.

What are the key learning points?

Our journey so far has provided may useful lessons. The below are only a few examples:

– Combining technical expertise and legal compliance assured by an expert external partner (Social Finance) with lower-cost operational -development work by in-house colleagues, for best value implementation and quick delivery

– Working through the challenges of aligning multiple LAs to review data sharing protocols prior to group agreement

– Balancing the upfront cost of implementing the right base architecture for the longer term against the imperative to deliver immediate analysis for specific projects

– Working with open-source solutions in partnership with other users

– Understanding what really matters in data analysis relating to the needs, experiences, and supporting services of children in care

– Learning where to compromise in order to align with partners, and where to agree to diverge towards bespoke approaches

Our solution is immediately replicable to other regions as-is, either with delivery support, or independently for teams with sufficient technical expertise. We’re currently working with DfE and our other partner organisations to explore how we can best share our learning and our approaches with other regions and extend our partnership.

Additional Comments

This work is a collaboration of many organisations, including:

• GMCA
• Data to Insight
• Social Finance
• MHCLG
• DfE
• Home and Future (South East RCC)
• London Councils
• East of England Regional network

We want to celebrate our achievement, and to recognise that we didn’t achieve this success on our own. Working in the open, working together, and aligning to common approaches, have enabled us to deliver a technical solution which is helping improve services for the children we support.