Bristol Evidence their Progress in Prevention with the Help of UMIS

Bristol YOT has a growing prevention initiative, offering a wide level of service provision across the city. With the number of projects having grown from 3 to 9 in just the last 3 years, the team are faced with the challenge of managing and getting the most out of the increasing amount of data they gather in their work with young people.

While much of the information gathered at Bristol is used in monitoring progress and planning the best action to take with each young person, the data is also important in identifying areas of need more generally and evidencing that the work they do really does make a difference. Which is, in turn, vital in providing their funding bodies with the information they require.

To help them manage their information and make most effective use of their data, the YOT rely on Social Software’s UMIS. Working with UMIS, the team at Bristol have developed a unique knowledge of the data they have and how they can best analyse it to meet their own and their funding bodies’ needs.

Senior Practitioner Chris Good has developed reporting practice to ensure that the team are able to extract evidence of all the positive changes observed, no matter how small; one example of this is in looking at risk reduction. In the past they only recorded those cases where the risk reduction was higher than 33%; however, this did not pick up every positive step that had been made and did not take into account that not all the young people involved in the prevention projects are expected to show a large decrease in risk.

To ensure they pick up all the positive improvements, the team use the ‘distance travelled’ tool in UMIS to pull out the data, and then categorise it within brackets of risk reduction covering the whole scale; under 5%, 5-14%, 15-30% and so on. As Chris explains, “some of the families we work with only need risk reducing in a certain area and we then pass them to another agency when they achieve this. This may make it look as though they haven’t achieved a great improvement and could therefore affect our figures, but by using UMIS to extract every snippet of risk reduction from the data we paint a much more accurate picture of the work we do.”

The distance travelled tool also helps the team clearly identify how an individual young person is doing and where the projects can improve support. “Where we see that a young person isn’t making as good progress as they should, we can begin to explore why this is,” explains Chris. “This involves looking at both the work we are doing inside the YOT and how other agencies impact this.”

In terms of their own work, the team are able to highlight areas of need from the data and ensure that everything possible is being done to help that young person in particular and across the YOT in practice more generally. And in identifying other agencies’ involvement, the team can recognise where they are unable to make the progress they would have hoped for due to factors such as lack of resources from other agencies.

Looking to the future, Chris and the team recognise that being able to pull out the required information for different funding bodies is going to be crucial and that different funding organisations are going to want to see different information in their returns. Nathan Pring, Management Information Assistant at Bristol YOT, has already worked with Social Software on developing wizards to meet their Neighbourhood Renewal Targets. As he says, “we used to have to run them by hand which took about 5 days, but with the new wizards it will be down to 1 day. We hope to be able to work with Social Software on further such developments to improve our use of UMIS and to make it easier to report to the different funding bodies.”

Being able to effectively use their data will continue to be crucial to Bristol YOT and the important work that they do. And, working with Social Software, they are sure to continue to make innovative use of their data in UMIS: so that they can continue to meet funding report requirements, best evidence their projects’ effectiveness and, most importantly, evaluate and improve the service they provide to young people.