With seven children’s centres in the borough, Bournemouth Borough Council makes good use of Capita One’s eStart to record, manage and analyse information on service provision.
Caroline Groom, Early Years Service Delivery Coordinator, explains: “We can use eStart to help us put in place and monitor early intervention activities. For example, if we know speech and language issues flagged in schools are concentrated to children who live in particular areas of the borough, we can alert the children’s centres to the need to run activities and services which support early years children with developing these skills.
An example of a successful initiative run in all children’s centres is the breast pump loan scheme. Caroline says: “One of the measures of our breast pump loan scheme is how many mums have been able to sustain breastfeeding – a important outcome for us. Again, using eStart, we could record how many reported back that being able to borrow the breast pump has enabled them to sustain breastfeeding - in this case a staggering – and very gratifying - 95% of mums.”
Caroline also values the powerful reporting tools: “Because we record everything in eStart, the information we get back when running reports is so rich. We can take information from different areas of our service and include them in one report to access the information we need in a meaningful way."
Caroline summarises the impact of using Capita One eStart: “Being able to evidence all the outcomes of an activity is much more valuable than simply recording the number of people taking part – it helps us to see if interventions aren’t working well so that we can guide the children’s centre on delivery. Notonly does eStart support us with the planning and delivery of services but, where we can see the activity is having an impact, we have the evidence to prove we’re really making a difference to people’s lives and that we’re a worthwhile service to keep going.”