We recently designed a bespoke Cost Calculator to meet the needs of Islington Council's Early Help service who needed to demonstrate service productivity, positive family outcomes and value for money locally. The DCLG national tool did not meet their needs (does not enable individual families to be input to produce family level and caseload reporting, or adding of real local costs etc.) and so we created a bespoke tool to include the:
We also produced a bespoke guidance manual for using the calculator and training for the team. We worked flexibly with Islington Council to tailor content, design and functionality as the work progressed, ensuring time to make revisions and amendments.
We are now supporting Islington with an evaluation of their Early Help service to support local decision making and this tool is being used to estimate the costs and predicted savings of delivering interventions to families.