Overview

The introduction of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) in 2014 compelled Cheshire East Council to consider how they recorded the whole assessment process for children with special needs.

A Driver for Change

SEN statements were previously recorded on a system provided by another supplier, however this was deemed unsuitable for EHCPs by the Council. The Council needed EHCPs to be part of the broader Early Help and Social Care record, and to enable multi-agency participation. The decision to record EHCPs within the Liquidlogic Early Help Module (EHM) was taken and the system was implemented by Cheshire East Council in Autumn 2015.

Phase 1

The initial phase of the project focussed on a launch to staff within the council internally. Speaking about the planning process Jonathan Sayer, Project Manager at Cheshire East Council says: “We wanted to divide the go live programme into three phases. Fundamentally it was important to train staff within the Council and for them to familiarise themselves with the Liquidlogic EHCP. Workstream meetings took place which included representation from the SEND team. In addition to this we held two-weekly configuration sessions up until the point of go-live. Changes were made after each of these sessions. As a result of this, additional forms were designed and some others changed. Although, Liquidlogic’s out of the box EHCP workflow was not changed as part of this process.”

Training

Full mandatory training sessions were carried out with around 80 users, predominantly from three key areas – SEN, 16+ and Early Years. In addition to this, hard copy user guides were created. Commenting on the training programme Jonathan Sayer goes on to say: “Engagement from the SEN Team helped to develop ‘Champions’ of the system who supported other users during go-live. We also had a number of floor walkers at the point of go-live to improve confidence levels.”

Phase 2

Given the nature of an Education Health & Care Plan, input from external agencies was deemed a crucial element of the project to ensure efficiencies and promote multi-agency working. Cheshire East Council embarked upon a second phase to seek input from partner agencies.

Jonathan Sayer comments: “The rollout of the system to external partners and other internal stakeholders was key to the success within the council. Following agreement on information sharing, we went on to train colleagues in health, social care and education psychology. This has facilitated invaluable contributions from others who know the individual child and led to process improvements. We were fortunate to receive the support of both senior management and our Designated Clinical Officer (DCO) on the Information Governance element of the project which absolutely helped.

Liquidlogic’s EHCP module has been well adopted, is used widely and improved assessment quality and speed. Users are positive and can see the benefits.”

Phase 3 - Future

The Council is rolling out Liquidlogic’s EHCP module to 155 schools and academies in the region to facilitate recording of the annual review process. This is currently a paper-based exercise, however in future the reviews will be seamlessly entered directly into the Liquidlogic system.

The Benefits

• Multi-agency working
• Evidencing contributions from multiple professionals
• Improved assessment quality and speed
• Reduction in manual processing
• Efficiencies in advice requests
• Increased security
• Reduction in numbers of queries and printing
• Clear 20-week timescale deadlines embedded within the workflow
• Supports reporting for SEN2 information recorded in the Liquidlogic system

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