Family Hubs Information Sharing Service

We're developing and improving how we currently share information about children, young people and families across the Children, Young People and Families Partnership so that practitioners can provide the right service at the right time so outcomes can be improved.

The Children, Young People and Families Partnership is good at sharing information between services (for example Family Safeguarding) but, we want to improve this and bring it into the digital age.

Lancashire County Council is working with partners, including NHS, police, public health, and schools, to improve how we share information about children, young people and families through this project.

Why we're doing it

There is a large amount of information that is captured and held on the children, young people, and families in receipt of services and is regularly reported on. This is usually shared via a wide range of mechanisms from secure email to telephone calls as this information is held securely by different partners and is not shared in a standardised way with other appropriate services.

This can cause issues, such as:

  • Practitioners (in schools, nurseries, local authority services, health etc) are spending excessive time inputting and processing information on families
  • Practitioners having less time to focus on delivering quality outcomes for families
  • There is no holistic 'big picture' view being formed of the services a family is receiving and which practitioners are working with them
  • There are no links  between the different systems and services creating delay in having information available
  • Limited capability to offer targeted support when its needed
  • Families are constantly having to re-tell their stories to practitioners in different services
  • Practitioners lack confidence in what information they can share

During the COVID-19 pandemic information sharing was critical to understanding the situation of vulnerable people including children young people and families, and so as a partnership we can see the opportunities that improving our information flow between partners and services will bring.

Creating a Family Hubs Information Sharing Service will accelerate the potential of our data capabilities and as a result will support services and partners making better informed decisions on how they operate at both a strategic and frontline level.

What the Information Sharing Service is

Some local authorities have implemented what is called an Information Sharing Service, which improves how data is shared securely across organisations that provide services to children, young people and families.

This has several benefits, including:

  • Practitioners (in schools, nurseries, local authority services, health etc) having better quality data and a holistic view of families and young people they are working with resulting in better outcomes
  • Information on families being readily available to practitioners, enabling them to refer to other services they may need
  • Practitioners saving time on admin and carrying out detective work, enabling them to spend more quality time with families delivering better outcomes
  • Forming links between systems and services
  • More targeted support before the point of escalation
  • A golden record (single source of the data truth) of data
  • Families not having to re-tell their stories
  • Potential to use the data analytics to shape LCC and Partners' future strategic vision and planning for services within Lancashire

What's next

The Children, Young People and Families Partnership is confident that the decision to develop a Family Hubs Information Sharing Service is the right approach to improve and revolutionise the partnership's data sharing abilities.

This will result in direct improvements in support for children, young people and families in Lancashire's. The Children, Young People and Families Partnership will continue to work with partners to develop and embed the Family Hubs Information Sharing Service over the next two years as part of delivering the Partnership vision that Children Young People and Families are safe, healthy and achieve their full potential.

Information governance & legal framework

Partners fully understand how important personal information is and  the legal basis for processing and sharing your personal data, in accordance with the UK GDPR may include the following: 

(e) Public Task: the processing is necessary for you to perform a task in the public interest or for your official functions, and the task or function has a clear basis in law. You must reference the applicable task/function and its' basis in law if you wish to rely on this basis for processing.

The legal basis for processing and sharing your personal category data, in accordance with the UK GDPR may include the following under Article 9:

  • (g) Reasons of substantial public interest (with a basis in law), 
  • (h) Health or social care (with a basis in law),
  • (i) Public health (with a basis in law)
  • (j) Archiving, research and statistics (with a basis in law)

The legislation that provides the clear basis in law for processing personal data will include but will not be limited to the following depending upon the specific circumstances:

The Information Sharing Service continues to work with partners establishing and agreeing the correct legal gateways to sharing and processing personal information. 

Legal Gateways

1 Care Act 2014 - Section 1 and 3
2 Childcare Act 2006 - Section 1 - General duties of local authority in relation to well-being of young children.
3 Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000
4 Crime and Disorder Act 1998 - Section 115
5 Crime and Disorder Act 1998 - Section 17 - Duty to consider crime and disorder implications
6 Crime and Disorder Act 1998 - Section 37
7 Criminal Justice Act 2003 - Section 325 of this Act details the arrangements for assessing risk posed by different offenders:
8 Education Act 2002 - various sections
9 Localism Act 2011
10 The Children Act 1989
11 The Children Act 2004 - Section 10 – Co-operation to improve wellbeing
12 The Children Act 2004 - Section 11 – Arrangements to safeguard and promote welfare.
13 Welfare Reform Act 2012 - Section 131
14 The Childrens and Families Act 2014
15 Digital Economy Act 2017- Part 5

Lancashire County Council's privacy notice 

LCC & DFE funding announcement

Information sharing and the use of information also has an ethical component and so the Partnership has developed a Partnership Ethics Group which will oversee proposals for our Family Hubs Information Sharing System and proposals for its use so that a comprehensive understanding of the ethics involved is part of our planning process.

For more information about the Family Hubs Information Sharing Service please contact folarin.banigbe@lancashire.gov.uk.