The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’s integrated children’s system was hailed by judges at the award ceremony as “breaking the mould” as it took the e-government excellence award for leadership and professionalism.
The council turned down a £147,000 grant in 2008 because it would have meant meeting a detailed government specification - child protection and IT experts concluded the requirement was too elaborate.
They feared it would add unnecessary cost and was so detailed it would lead to box ticking rather than professionally judged assessments of risk.
They also suspected that entering the information required under the specification would eat into critical time spent talking with and understanding children and family situations and that the system would be poor at generating documents for case conferences and other proceedings.
“We are very proud of this IT award, our system, and our officers who worked so hard to produce it,” said Shireen Ritchie, cabinet member for Family and Children’s Services.
“Refusing a large Government grant is a difficult and controversial thing to do. But we believe the Government spec for this critical recording system was over engineered. It was wrong for the Royal Borough and wrong for our children in need.”
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Quelle/Source: Local Government Chronicle, 25.01.2010
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