Introducing North Yorkshire’s SAVVI Project for School Readiness Vulnerability

by Shelley Heckman, Published 27 May 2021

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For those of you that are following the SAVVI Project (Scalable Approach to Vulnerability via Interoperability), you will know that we are in phase two and that phase two is in three parts. One part is supporting Huntingdonshire District Council to use the SAVVI standards and process as part of their vulnerability management project; I blogged about this earlier this month. Today I am talking about the second part: supporting North Yorkshire County Council to use SAVVI standards and processes in their vulnerability project.

North Yorkshire have identified ‘school readiness’ as a particular topic area that they would like to explore. They are looking to the SAVVI project to help them to gain insight and evidence to inform a risk model and which ‘vulnerability attributes’ are predictors. This puts the North Yorkshire case study at a different place to that of Huntingdonshire in that their SENA project already has a developed risk model, and they are looking to build a community service directory.

North Yorkshire County Council, on the other hand, has a mature ‘community services directory’ and they have adopted the Open Referral UK data standards. NYCC would like to be able to make smarter referrals to services that are described in the directory.

NYCC recognises the importance of having a trusted, transparent process when using data to represent need and are excited at the opportunity to review and improve our approach to that. It’s really important for NYCC to close the loop, and after identifying cohorts, link that back to what services we have, or need to have that can improve the situation. We see SAVVI as potentially invaluable framework we can use to support North Yorkshire residents.

John Kelly

North Yorkshire County Council

We kicked off our joint working with an inaugural first meeting of teams. The North Yorkshire team (consisting of NYCC’s internal data & Business Intelligence, Info Gov and Troubled Families teams) and the SAVVI team (consisting of Tameside Council/iStandUK, Digital Gaps and Porism) met to put faces to names, align ways of working, and to commit to working well together.

Over the coming weeks, the process coach, IG support and technical support from the SAVVI team will be working closely with North Yorkshire County Council, with the view to supporting the school readiness project and capturing repeatable learning and outputs to share with other councils and partners also wishing to use the SAVVI process and standards to support their vulnerable people and households.

The SAVVI objectives when working with both North Yorkshire and the Huntingdonshire case studies include:

Improved SAVVI standards and process

Material for the SAVVI catalogue

An understanding of the resources necessary to run a SAVVI project

Evidence for a business case to run a SAVVI project

A reference implementation of the SAVVI standards

To this end, the anticipated outputs for SAVVI from working with North Yorkshire include:

A risk model for ‘school readiness’: SAVVI will work with NYCC to come up with a definition of school readiness as a vulnerability with a set of vulnerability attributes as predictors of school readiness. The risk model should also include a set of ‘data asks’ refined from the vulnerability attributes, and a proposal for a risk model that uses the predictors to find vulnerable people/households.

Service Blueprint: this is likely to include a diagram that illustrates the SAVVI process as it could be deployed at North Yorkshire to address school readiness’, with steps, actions and actors picked out required to support deployment.

Case Study: this is a document that records the relevant steps that NYCC took and maps them to the phases of the SAVVI process, capturing the inputs and outputs generated. The case study will be designed to be read by practitioners from each of the organisation types defined in the SAVVI process.

Proposals for improvements to the SAVVI process: this will take the form of an issue log that records where the SAVVI process was not a good fit for NYCC, including steps that were unnecessary, missing or not sufficiently well defined.

Templates: a set of templates that could be used by other councils running a SAVVI project.

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