Driving lasting change in public services by partnering with government to fix the software market
The problem: fragmented data, fragmented systems
For decades, professionals in children’s social care have struggled to access the full picture of the children and families they support.
Information is fragmented across thousands of agencies’ separate IT systems, often with no easy way to bring it together.
The result is that practitioners spend too much time trying to find out who knows what, and to get hold of them – our research suggests about six times longer than is necessary. This makes it hard to make the quick decisions that safeguarding requires.
In the worst cases, a missed piece of information can have devastating consequences for children and their families.
Front-line professionals… frequently stated that clunky information technology (IT) systems meant that sharing information was extremely time consuming and often involved duplicated processes of submitting forms, or having to phone other professionals to find out information.
Josh McAlister CBE in his report, The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care 2022
‘Family Context’ – our tech solution that didn’t scale
Social Finance set out to address this challenge by building a single view product — a tool which brings together information from different agencies.
We secured backing from Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and a private philanthropist, and started work in collaboration with the social work and digital teams at Leeds and Stockport local authorities. Together, we built Family Context.
Family Context works.
- Evaluations demonstrated that when using the Family Context App the average time spent by a social worker on follow up on a case dropped from 3 hours to less than half an hour, potentially saving each social worker 190 hours a year.
- Both Leeds and Stockport continue to use Family Context effectively.
- The Independent Review of Children’s Social Care (Josh MacAlister, 2022) cited Family Context as an example of automated information sharing.
We built Family Context to put the key information that social workers need into their hands, essentially:
- Which other service are involved.
- Who to contact to find out more.
The purpose of Family Context is to quickly surface information about who may know what, and to facilitate conversations between lead practitioners from those services, so that frontline practitioners can better support families and safeguard children.
To maximise the value and scale of our work to other local authorities, we worked with the Information Commissioner’s Office to develop a data protection impact assessment (DPIA), which could be re-used by other local authorities.
In 2021 we launched Family Context as a pilot in Stockport. During this eight week phase, the tool achieved what it set out to do:
- It saved time for social workers, prioritising more time to spend with families.
- It empowered social workers to make informed decisions more easily.
- It better connected service around a family.
Family Context’s success led to Stockport and Leeds councils rolling it out across their entire service.
All the work was done collaboratively and is publicly available in the project GitHub page where you can find our user research, the business case, an implementation guide, as well as the evaluation of the pilot. The code remains free for any organisation who wish to use it.
But for Social Finance, impact means driving change across the whole system — not just two local authorities out of 153.
Our theory was that by creating an open source solution (one which local authorities can use without paying us), others could easily adopt it and scale its benefits.
We were wrong.
Why technology alone isn’t enough
Even though Family Context is free to use, integrating it with the dozens of legacy systems that hold children’s data is slow, complex, and costly. The challenge isn’t the product itself — it’s the ecosystem it sits within.
That experience taught us a vital lesson: delivering better technology for public servants is rarely just about building better products. It’s about reshaping the systems of data sharing, which any single view product is embedded in – information governance, missing infrastructure, and interoperability standards.
Those, not the creation of a product, are the difference between 20 local authorities having a single view system, and all 153 local authorities with responsibility for children’s social care in England having one.
The next step: Partnering with government to change the system
Since 2024, Social Finance has worked closely with the Department for Education (DfE) — helping the Department consider how it can become an effective steward of the market for data and digital systems in children’s social care.
Through that work, a clear need emerged: creating interoperability standards so that data can move safely and efficiently between the systems used by different local authorities and partners.
In 2025 Social Finance partnered with the Department to launch a three‑year interoperability standards programme – working with LAs and their technology vendors to change the way that Case Management Systems and their equivalents work, so that this information can flow freely.
One of our ambitions for this work is to enable every local authority in the country to have access to a single view system.
Building single view systems isn’t the issue – they’ve been here for ages. The challenge is the cost and complexity of connecting them to the legacy systems they need to pull data from. That is the problem which interoperability standards address.
We’re proud to have moved on from building the single view product, to creating a system in which it is realistic for SingleView products to spread. That is impact at scale.