The Guardian Family Futures 2010
In 2008 Captive Minds was invited by the Department for Children Schools and Families to come up with a web-based solution to facilitate better communication between the 250,000 children who use the social care system, the social workers who mentor them and the courts. It took eighteen months to develop the portal and a further three months of beta testing to make sure that all those who used the system understood what it could do and how it could change their work processes. MyCafcass was adopted by the Department in late 2009 and after six months of intensive use, the new e-communications system was described as ‘world class’ in an independent government audit by PA Consulting.
The portal has now been ‘road tested’ by over 100,000 children and it has changed the way they view the whole system and made the whole process much more familiar and a lot less intimidating. For the social workers it has enabled them to concentrate on what they do best – dealing with the children’s needs – and has freed up extra time that had previously been spent on arranging meetings at court. Going forward, the Department plans to adopt the portal as the central plank in their communications strategy and roll it out to all 92 offices up and down the country.
Captive Minds owns the proprietary technology behind the platform and administers MyCafcass for the DCSF.
The Guardian Family Futures 2010 from Captive Minds on Vimeo.
