Southwark LBC

This award is open to a single council or where appropriate a partnership of councils, or a council- owned company. Private sector partners can enter on a council’s behalf, with the permission of the council itself. Children’s services are very much under pressure, and ever more so in the face of a cost of living crisis, adding to the numbers of potentially vulnerable children. There is an imperative to protect vulnerable children, the importance of early intervention and the changing relationship with schools – all under an intense media and now social spotlight. This award is intended to recognise the success of those councils that adopt a genuinely strategic approach to this vital service area in the face of extraordinary challenges. Entries can focus either on a specific aspect of the council’s work on children’s services or the entirety of its work on children’s services.

The Supporting Families dashboard is an important first step in ensuring that authority-wide intelligence – predictive, preventative and automated data - becomes key to decision making. We want to put data ‘intelligence’ – joined-up, data-driven decision-making – at the heart of Southwark LBC to ensure our citizens, especially those most in need, are able to access the right services at the right time. Our ‘single view’ approach is also enabling our frontline teams to deliver the greatest impact to the end user, our citizens. The next phase of our programme is to roll out this more collaborative, integrated approach.