School Attendance Reporting: 6 Week - Discovery

Peak Indicators (now TPXimpact Data & Insights) is a part of a digital transformation company on a mission to build a future where people, places and the planet are supported to thrive. This solution removes barriers to data sharing between departments within a LocalGov organisation, whilst ensuring highly sensitive data is kept secure and accessible to only authorised individuals

When the COVID-19 crisis struck, and schools closed to all except vulnerable children and those of key workers, the existing reporting needed to be enhanced to make sure that children were kept safe. One of the key challenges that surfaced was how council workers accessed school attendance data – specifically for vulnerable children.

What's the problem?

• The COVID-19 crisis was a developing situation, and in the existing system it was very time consuming for council workers to access data for vulnerable children, to check whether they were attending school or not.
• There was an existing system in place to distribute the data on a daily basis to the council employees that needed access to it - however, the overall process of accessing this data took approximately 2 hours per day.
• The team needed an automated solution to save time and effort, so that they could concentrate on data analysis, making decisions quickly and find information about vulnerable people when it’s needed the most, reducing safeguarding issues.

Here’s how it works:

• We built a Data Lake in Azure with end-to-end automation, connecting to CareFirst covering data ingestion, transformation, modelling and visualisation in Power BI - removing manual processes and saving the team time
• We designed and built a solution in collaboration with key users, to make it easy for authorised users to access the data they needed through Power BI dashboards, granting a central point to this data system, replacing the splintered legacy system - improving adoption across the council
• We then ensured access was for authorised individuals only, enabling users to easily and securely share and access sensitive data across departments

What's the impact?

• The result of this cross-organisational collaborative effort, was an end-to-end data extraction and reporting solution that has removed a manual task – saving 2 hours of work, per day, per employee for DCC’s Education Business Unit.
• The key requirement of refreshing data on a daily basis without occupying a lot of council worker time was met. This was achieved by an automated process that ensured vulnerable child school attendance data was refreshed not once, but seven times per day. This means that the data can rapidly be accessed securely by authorised council workers, without them needing to perform time-consuming administrative tasks.
• As data could both be accessed more quickly, and could be relied upon more confidently, this work empowered users to access data with greater confidence.
• The internal technology capability of Devon’s Educational team was increased, through training and guides provided to them by us. We collaborated with users and stakeholders to design a system that was user friendly, leading to wide adoption across the department.

This solution is perfect for:

• Social Care Workers
• Education Service Staff

Products Responsible:

• Azure Data Lake
• Azure Data Factory
• Azure SQL DB
• Power BI