Analysis of Time Saved
by Practitioners
Supplementary memorandum by the
Department for Children, Schools and Families
Benefits of ContactPoint
1. ContactPoint will deliver a number of benefits
for practitioners and for children, young people and families.
The benefits of the project include:
- less time spent finding out which other workers
are involved with a child or young person;
- identifying children and young people who are
not receiving universal services (education and primary healthcare);
- better information to inform planning of support
for children and young people;
- supporting better communication between workers
and agencies across the children's workforce - making multi-agency
responses to a child, young person and family much simpler; and
- helping to improve service experiences for children,
young people and families.
2. The project will monitor the benefits identified
in its Business Case at local and national level.
3. In addition to the direct benefits identified
in the Business Case (which form the basis of the predicted 5
million practitioner hours per year (approx 113,000 hours per
week) which can be saved (basis of this calculation set out below)),
there may be other benefits including reducing the possibility
of duplicated effort in relation to assessments. If ContactPoint
indicates that a Common Assessment has already been completed
it is less likely that another will be undertaken, duplicating
effort already made - reducing the frustration felt by children,
young people and families when they have to tell different practitioners
the same stories over and over again.
Basis of the predicted 5 million practitioner
hours (equivalent to £88m)
4. The analysis in the table below shows the
total estimated time saved per week for each of the Practitioner
Groups included in the assessment presented in the Business Case.
5. Time saved data were derived from the survey
of practitioner activity undertaken in Trailblazer areas with
a local Index in April 2005, and moderated in discussion with
Index Managers in East Sussex.
6. It assumes that practitioners work 35 hours
per week and that the time saved by a National system is 10% greater
than that saved by a Local system.
| Practitioner Group
| % of
Time Saved
| Work-force
| Estimated Time Saved Per Week (hrs)
| Est. Time Saved Per Week with a National Index (hrs)
|
| School Nurse
| 7.2% |
800 | 2,016
| 2,218 |
| Health Visitors
| 7.2% |
10,000 | 25,200
| 27,720 |
| Social Worker
| 3.2% |
27,000 | 30,240
| 33,264 |
| Education (Admin)
| 2.0% |
22,024 | 15,417
| 16,959 |
| Paediatrician (Admin)
| 7.2% |
7,194 | 18,129
| 19,942 |
| Connexions
| 3.2% |
5,280 | 5,914
| 6,504 |
| Youth Offending
| 3.2% |
5,280 | 5,914
| 6,504 |
| Total
| 102,830 |
113,111 |
Universality, Ordinary Residence and how ContactPoint
might help the most vulnerable
7. ContactPoint is principally about supporting
early intervention for children who at some point in their lives
need additional services (30% at any one time and 50% during their
lives). Children move in and out of this spectrum of need and
it is not possible to predict which children will require additional
services or indeed when.
8. A 'universal' system is much less stigmatising
- every child is included and therefore no judgement will be made
about a child because they are included. Without a universal system
practitioners may make decisions about the need or vulnerability
of a child in absence of all of the available information because
they may only contact and speak to those practitioners that they
are able to easily locate rather than all those that are working
with the child.
9. Holding records only for those children judged
to be 'at risk' would prove a much more difficult task. It
would require subjective judgments about whether the child meets
the threshold for inclusion on the database and further judgments
about whether they have fallen below that threshold and should
be removed from the database. It is proportionate to hold a small
amount of information on all children rather than continually
making threshold decisions about which children to put on ContactPoint
and which to take off.
10. Practitioners have told us that being able
to identify and contact others working with the same child is
frustrating and time consuming process - time they would much
rather invest in providing services to children, young people
and families. In fact, a recent survey of nearly 3,000 practitioners
told us that on average practitioners need to make contact
with other services 107 times a year and that it takes an average
of 4 hours each time.
11. ContactPoint is designed to enable practitioners
to quickly and easily identify others working with the child.
So whether the child is in need of additional services or
at risk of significant harm all the relevant practitioners can
be quickly drawn together and, where appropriate, can work
together to deliver more coordinated support.
12. All children have a right to the universal
services of education and primary health care. ContactPoint will
show whether or not they are receiving those services and will
support local authorities in their duty to identify those missing
or at risk of going missing from education.
Ordinary Residence
13. Where a child is in receipt of a service
from an organisation listed in the Regulations and has supplied
an address in England to the organisation then that demonstrates
an ordinary residence for ContactPoint purposes.
14. In Victoria Climbié's case, we understand
that her Aunt presented Victoria as only being in England on a
temporary basis. However, the Aunt was claiming child benefit
and had registered Victoria with two GPs. On both of these counts
Victoria's details would, under our proposed arrangements, have
been supplied to ContactPoint.
Universality
15. It useful to consider the case of Victoria
Climbié again in order to compare how a database limited
to children with additional needs would work in comparison to
the proposed universal ContactPoint.
16. Victoria was clearly a child who we would
want to see on a child-in-need database. Those who met her did
not assess her to be a child that had needs and, in part, this
was because she was viewed as a child who was only here temporarily.
Therefore it is questionable whether she would appear on a child-in-need
database.
17. However, because her Aunt was in receipt
of child benefit and had registered Victoria with GPs she would
have appeared in ContactPoint, had it existed at the time. Had
the various social workers that came into contact with Victoria
looked up her details in ContactPoint they would have found that
she was known as a child living in England and was registered
with a GP. They would have therefore been in a position to insist
on taking notice of her situation and may have undertaken a Common
Assessment as a result. She would also have been listed in a Children
Missing Education report and her absence from education would
have been followed up by her local authority. As a result, she
may have been placed in a school and there her condition would
have been observed daily.
18. Only a universal database
would therefore have been able to make a difference to her treatment.
19. The key arguments for a universal
database are therefore:
- assisting practitioners to better
understand the circumstances of a child and therefore better assess
whether there are additional needs
- better able to ensure that children
do not fall through the net
- proportionate - a very small amount
of information just sufficient to achieve the objectives of ensuring
that the nation can ensure that every child not only survives
but also thrives and has the opportunity to achieve. Although
we have a duty of care and to ensure that every child matters,
we do not in fact know accurately how many children there are
in England, let alone who are they are.
- only a universal database will
identify which children are not receiving education or enjoying
the benefit of primary healthcare
Estimated Number and Type of Users
20. The Feasibility Study on the
project, which reported in July 2004, estimated that the tool
would be used by around 330,000 practitioners from across the
children's workforce (55,000 practitioners in Health, 158,000
in Education, 44,000 in Social Care and 75,000 in Youth Justice
and others).
21. The principal groups expected
to require access to information held on ContactPoint are:
- Children's Social Workers;
- Connexions and Youth Services
Workers;
- General Practitioners (plus GP
Practice Nurses and Administrators);
- Health Visitors and Midwives;
- Paediatricians;
- School Nurses;
- SEN Teachers
- Heads, Deputy Heads and Heads
of Year;
- Education Welfare Workers;
- Accident and Emergency Staff;
- Youth Offending Teams; and
- Voluntary and Community Sector
Organisations.
22. This estimate recognised the fact that not
all children's services workers will require access to the information
held on ContactPoint. In general, it is those workers who have
responsibility for assessing the needs of children and young people
and determining the best course of action to meet those needs
who will need access to this tool. Where the worker's role is
focused on delivery of services, there will be less need for a
tool of this kind. Of those practitioners who do require access
to ContactPoint data, the majority are expected to require Direct
Access to the system, but some might either need or prefer ContactPoint
data to be provided through a local or organisational contact
(Mediated Access).
23. These estimates will continue to be refined
as Local Authorities and national Implementation Partners complete
and refine the workforce analyses for their areas of interest.
Cost Breakdowns for Merits Committee
Breakdown of Implementation Costs - £224
million
24. The breakdown of implementation costs is
as shown below.
| Activity
| Cost
(£k)
|
| Software/Development
| 15,473 |
| Data Centre Set-up
| 19,467 |
| Local Implementation Teams
| 62,492 |
| National Project Team
| 32,503 |
| Data Trials
| 533 |
| Implementation Co-ordinators
| 6,477 |
| Trailblazers
| 1,677 |
| Infrastructure Set-Up Costs
| 447 |
| Training for ContactPoint Trainers
| 1,878 |
| Initial Data Supply
| 3,055 |
| Support for Local Training
| 1,105 |
| Modification of Data Suppliers' Systems
| 19,163 |
| Data matching
| 4,113 |
| Case Management System Modifications
| 28,965 |
| Contingency
| 7,184 |
| Local Communications and Promotion
| 12,051 |
| Central Communications and Promotion
| 7,411 |
| Total |
223,995 |
25. Local Implementation Team Costs, included
above, will be funded from grants allocated to Local Authorities
and National Implementation Partners. These will include the costs
identified in the table below
| Activity
| Cost
(£k)
|
| Local Trainers
| 7,149 |
| Backfill for Practitioners[8] attending training
| 5,742 |
| Training Facilities
| 3,421 |
| Personnel
| 35,168 |
| Communications
| 9,440 |
| CRB Checks
| 4,192 |
| Security Tokens
| 162 |
| Local Case Management System Modifications
| 7,500 |
| Total Cost to end 08/09
| 72,774 |
| Allocated to operating costs
| (10,281)
|
| Total Contribution to Implementation Costs
| 62,492 |
Breakdown of Operating Costs - £41m per annum
25. The breakdown of operating costs is as shown
below.
| Activity
| Cost
(£k)
|
| Operational Team
| |
| Local ContactPoint Personnel Costs
| 13,210 |
| Central Operational Management Team
| 1,101 |
| Contingency on personnel costs (50%)
| 7,155 |
| Long-Term Hosting
| 4,413 |
| Disaster Recovery
| 1,099 |
| Value Added Tax
| 4,721 |
| Inflation on Baseline Cost Estimates
| 2,638 |
| IT Support and Data Supply
| |
| IT Support
| 1,280 |
| Data Supply Updates
| 360 |
| Infrastructure Operating Cost
| 200 |
| Contingency
| 914 |
| Value Added Tax
| 482 |
| Inflation on Baseline Cost Estimates
| 269 |
| Other Operating Costs
| |
| Depreciation
| 728 |
| Cost of Capital
| 70 |
| Software Refresh
| 1,541 |
| Governance Team
| 640 |
| Total
| 40,821 |
26. Local ContactPoint personnel costs include
provision for an average of 2.4 full time equivalent staff in
every Local Authority. This is expected to be sufficient to cover
the additional costs incurred by Local Authorities. The roles
to be performed at local level include:
- Service Manager (1 FTE per LA
on average);
- IT Support (0.2 FTE per LA);
- Data Administrator (0.5 FTE per
LA);
- Training and development (0.2
FTE per LA); and
- User Administrator (0.5 FTE per
LA).
Per Capita Costs
27. The cost to build and implement ContactPoint
is equivalent to £9.63 per C&YP [Children and Young People]
and its estimated operating cost is £3.55 per C&YP per
annum.
28. It is not straightforward to estimate the
costs that would apply if the coverage of ContactPoint were restricted
to a smaller group of C&YP (e.g. Children currently in receipt
of specialist and targeted services, or vulnerable children).
ContactPoint will not, initially have any a priori information
about which C&YP fall into these categories.
29. It is unlikely that the same approach would
be taken to build a database whose coverage was limited in this
way as has been proposed to achieve universal coverage in ContactPoint.
30. However, if the scope of ContactPoint were
to be restricted to say 30-50% of C&YP, the fixed costs of
the project would be spread across a much smaller population of
C&YP.
31. Additional costs would also be incurred to
support filtering of data input (if data suppliers had to identify
data relating to only those children with identified additional
needs rather than those with an address in England - a task that
the four national suppliers of data would struggle to achieve
because they are not in a position to judge which children they
should supply data for) and greater effort would need to be allocated
to data matching and cleansing. The result would be a substantial
increase in the implementation cost (adding up to £20m to
the existing £224m cost) and significant increase in the
per capita cost of ContactPoint.
32. Depending on the approach taken and the proportion
of C&YP included, the per capita cost of implementation could
thus be between £39.41 and £70.86 per C&YP.
July 2007
8 This is estimated to be required for a proportion
of those who attend ContactPoint training Back
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