tailored to their needs - ThoughtWorks

A cost effective portal
tailored to their needs
The Place2Be is a charity working in 172 UK schools. Its vision
is to improve the emotional well-being of children, their families
and the school communities in England, Scotland and Wales.
The charity was launched in 1994 after increased concern about
the extent and depth of emotional and behavioural difficulties
displayed in classrooms and playgrounds.

Highlights
ThoughtWorks develops unique webbased
application to enable faster,
secure access to important and
confidential child data and statistics
Time to access the data is reduced
from 18 months to real-time data
analysis.
Software increases resource
availability within the Research and
Evaluation team due to reduced
demand for data entry
The Place2Be gives children in schools a safe place to express their feelings
through talking, creative work and play. It provides a range of school-based
support services directly to children, parents and school staff members,
including one-to-one and group counselling sessions, a lunchtime service
and whole-class activities such as ‘circle time’.
At the heart of their mission is a clear commitment to supporting children
with evidential research. In practical terms, this involves rigorous selfevaluation
of the clinical practices carried out as well as undertaking
exploratory research using data collected over a number of years. This
allows the charity to challenge their methods and support continued
development of a quality-based, effective practice. Research figures and
data that are collected by The Place2Be are of the upmost importance
to the charity, schools and local authorities.
The Place2Be has an in-house research and evaluation team that carries
out all the internal evaluations for the organisation and is currently working
towards achieving wider external evaluation and recognition of the work.
The partnership between The Place2Be and ThoughtWorks began in
December 2010 and has focused on developing an electronic data capture
format for field staff. The initial pilot was released in March 2011. And the
full launch went live in August 2011.
Challenges
Like many charities working with children, The Place2Be is required by law
to capture and document all correspondence from each meeting with any
child, parent or group. This includes all conversations and questionnaires
completed by the child, parent and/or teacher, assessment sheets and case
information forms.
www.thoughtworks.com

Previously, this was all recorded on paper and sent by
post to The Place2Be’s head office. From there it was
forwarded to an external scanning company and the
digital version was then sent to an external data handling
company. After several months the data would be
available for the statisticians to analyse. This approach
slowed down their data analysis and meant their most
recent available data was 12 months old.
The answer was to look for a different and secure way
of capturing the information from each child interaction.
Not only would this speed up the paper to statistic
turnaround time, it would save the charity money in the
long term. However, it needed to be done in a way that
was cost effective to the organisation and would not
cause too much disruption to the staff’s daily roles
with the children.
The answer was to explore a web-based data capture
format and after an introduction from a mutual friend
of the business, The Place2Be turned to global IT
consultancy, ThoughtWorks, for help in designing a
bespoke portal for capturing data. Having previously
worked on similar projects, the ThoughtWorks team
understood how important it would be to develop a
robust tool that would provide a simple, quick solution
to capturing data effectively.
“
This is a major event and something
to really celebrate. Thank you to all for their
involvement; this is truly a landmark in the
development of The Place2Be.
”
Benita Refson OBE, Place2Be Chief Executive
The ThoughtWorks solution
The ThoughtWorks team worked closely with Louisa
McCallion, Digital Media Executive and other key
stakeholders at The Place2Be, to identify the challenges
the organisation was facing and how it could develop a
cost effective portal tailored to the organisation’s needs.
Working with input from users, the ThoughtWorks team
developed a web-based application which was not only
simple to use but would have a demonstrable impact on
the business. A selection of developers worked tirelessly
over a five-month period to build the software in line with
the objectives that had been set.
Following the successful build and development of the
application, using ThoughtWorks’ Agile principles, a pilot
test was launched in Ealing, West London. For one month,
field staff inputted their data and recorded conversations
via the web-application to identify any difficulties or
problems that occurred.
Feedback from the pilot test was then taken into account
and four months later, the scheme was formally rolled
out to all 172 schools. Along with the application roll-out,
step by step online training webinars were created by the
in-house research team at The Place2Be and delivered
to all the regional field staff.
www.thoughtworks.com

Benefits
Since introducing the web-based portal, field staff
have been able to enter the results from their child
correspondence directly into the database. This has
provided The Place2Be instant access to regional
and national results.
The Place2Be is already benefitting from a much quicker
turnaround on statistics and in 5 years’ time the project
will have paid for itself.
“
The ThoughtWorks team were incredibly
responsive to our needs. They understood our
business requirements and that speeding up
our data capturing process was vital to the
charity. They also understood that it had to
be cost effective to our business and that our
staff would need extensive training schemes
in place.
”
Louisa McCallion, ThePlace2Be Digital Media Executive
The Future
The charity will review other areas of the business that
can be updated in the coming years, but for now, are
happy with the web application.
“
We are delighted with how this project
has worked out. Originally we expected some
resistance to the project but our field staff
have been extremely receptive to the new
technology. In fact, there has been such a
positive outcome to the rollout that we have
been asked to extend the service to other
paperwork areas of their job roles.
”
Louisa McCallion, ThePlace2Be Digital Media Executive
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