Streamlining triage in children's social care

Every reported concern about a child needs careful attention. But with heavy caseloads and squeezed resources, social workers need to prioritise and process referrals efficiently. We worked with Bath & North East Somerset Council to design a system that reduced inappropriate referrals to statutory social care by two thirds.

The team in Children's Services at B&NES receive thousands of contacts about children every year. Over half of them - mostly from police, health workers and other agencies - don't meet the threshold for statutory social care, and would be better handled by Early Help and Prevention Services or universal community services.

Reviewing those concerns means diverting qualified social workers away from existing caseloads. Meanwhile, professionals working with children - teachers, health visitors, GPs - were filling in lengthy referral forms by hand, with a "better safe than sorry" mindset and little knowledge of what happens next.

How might we help referrers confidently direct their concerns to the right source of support first time, and reduce the administrative burden on the social work team?

The council was keen to adopt user-centred and agile methods and was building its own internal service design capability. So we took a "one team" approach - two pandas working alongside three in-house Service Designers, a Technical Lead, the Head of Safeguarding and the Principal Social Worker.

We worked in two-week sprints with a shared backlog, regular Show & Tells and planning sessions.

Discovering opportunities

In Discovery we interviewed and ran workshops with frontline staff and managers to understand what they needed to get done when processing contacts. We interviewed referring professionals - teachers, police officers, GPs, hospital workers - to understand their motivations, behaviours and needs when they're worried about a child.

We reviewed case-management data, read up on how other councils work, and pieced together a detailed map of the current flow of contacts into the service. Findings landed in Airtable, with insights linked back to raw evidence.

Turning opportunities into Alphas

Research revealed fifteen opportunities to make a difference. We prioritised by potential impact and feasibility, then sketched and scoped four ideas for Alpha:

1. 01

   An online landing page and contact screener for professional referrers.

2. 02

   An online "Request for service" form, replacing the existing Word document.

3. 03

   Dashboards and notifications to reassure referrers their concern is being dealt with.

4. 04

   Redesigning the flow of referrals into teams using a Systemic Practice Model.

See our Online Discovery Report for all the detail.

Testing risky assumptions

We started Alpha by calling out the risky assumptions our ideas relied on - the beliefs that needed to be true for them to work - and tested them as efficiently as possible. For the online screener we needed to know we could gather enough nuanced information to route contacts accurately, that we could agree the routing logic, and that we could push data into the Liquid Logic case-management system securely and with minimal manual effort.

By the end of twelve weeks the team was convinced the ideas were valuable, usable and feasible. We estimated the screener and request-for-service form alone could reduce time spent processing new contacts by as much as 65%.

Before our system was implemented, social workers were spending precious time investigating hundreds of referrals each month that resulted in No Further Action. The new system gathers more information from referrers and routes their concerns to the right source of support automatically.

NFA'd referrals fell from 57% of all referrals to just 19%. Social workers are now spending their time on the cases that need them most, and referrers are getting support from other teams more quickly - supporting better outcomes for children and families.

New capabilities

The internal team also took on substantial new service-design skills, ready to lead the next project themselves.