'Connect Digitally', formerly the school eAdmissions national project set up in 2004, is a central-local partnership funded by the Department for Education (DfE) and led by Hertfordshire county council. Its focus is online school admissions and automated application for free school meals, helping achieve electronic service take-up rates in some areas of 80% or higher, the level at which the government considers services to be "digital by default". More recently its work has widened to boost take-up of all online public services.
Tim Spiers, the programme's technology and delivery lead, said this week discussions are ongoing about future opportunities. In the meantime electronic admissions and school meal application services would continue to be run and supported by DfE - "business as usual".
One possible new model for continuing the work of Connect Digitally can be seen in a project developed independently by two county councils which unites three very topical public policy themes - public-private partnership, shared services and cloud computing, Spiers said.
This heady brew of Coalition policy ingredients has been mixed by LGSS, the innovative shared service vehicle set up by Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire county councils. Working with software partner Firmstep, the body has developed a cloud-based solution for checking students' eligibility for free school meals, interacting with the data hub developed by Connect Digitally with DfE and three other government departments.
LGSS is a "joint committee" which shares 1,100 staff across all back-office services including finance, IT, legal services, property, pensions, payroll, audit and procurement. Together it shares £83m of cost and recoups almost a third of that back by providing services to other organisations - Norwich City council is poised to be the latest to sign up to transfer it own finance, IT and revenues and benefits services into LGSS. "We will do anything in our power to reduce back office costs, that is our drive, and one of the ways we do this is through innovation," says Rocco Labellarte, director of operations at LGSS.
With Firmstep, the body developed a new cloud-based online solution for handling free school meal requests, building on the work of Connect Digitally, which cut costs from up to £13 per request to about £2.50, Labellarte says. "We realised we could potentially offer it to every other local authority, schools and academies across the UK". Initial set-up is free with users paying a 90p fee per child to the partnership, meaning they still make a major saving and revenue is generated which is split 50-50 between Firmstep and LGSS, he says. With around 2 million UK schoolchildren entitled to free meals, the potential revenue is high, and the partnership is even developing a mobile app so parents can apply for the service on their smartphones.
With Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire county councils poised to set up a similar shared service vehicle, could this kind of very modern, very Coalition entrepreneurship be the future for public e-services?
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Dan Jellinek
Quelle/Source: UKauthorITy, 20.03.2012
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