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eGOV Attendance Collection

Welcome to the eGOV Attendance Collection Service.

We are delighted to announce the opening of a new exciting venture to benefit looked after children and supporting professionals.

We have developed a new and enhanced children’s monitoring service for tracking attendance and collecting attainment data.

The new secure service will monitor children’s daily attendance and notify professionals about the child’s absence or lateness. Attendance Collect also monitors emotional well-being and behavioural patterns, highlighting key indicators and spotting potential concerns. 

Our team and clients have helped expanded on the foundation of a platform we developed in 2003. The electronic personal education plan (ePEP Online) is now used by over 120 local authorities in England and Wales. We have applied our 22 years of knowledge and first hand experience with supporting vulnerable young people to develop Attendance Collect. The platform will provide a new quality call service for local authorities and schools and save local authorities thousands of pounds.  

Gary Daniels

Call 0333 772 9622 for more information or visit: 

https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/546285869223809

National Education ePEP the PEP to Success

Service Overview

We are market leaders supporting local authorities with educational & attendance monitoring for looked-after children. The company has a dedicated team of developers and support specialists who passionate and highly experienced with supporting the largest to the smallest authorities in the country.Gary Daniels managing director originally developed ePEP (Electronic Personal Education Plan) platform over 18 years ago. We have continually developed and enhanced the cloud based platform to accommodate the changing environment and changes to legalisation. We are confident we offer the very best dedicated service to support Virtual Schools with disadvantaged children.

The National ePEP Single Sign-on has become the total online package to track and monitor looked after children’s educational progress and outcomes, through the online ePEP single sign-on. The service includes the collection of live attendance data daily or weekly and the collection of termly key stage attainment data. Involving social workers, designated teachers, providers, support specialists and most importantly parents and carers to work and communicate securely online with the local authority.

We are a young person focused company that is culturally aligned with many ethnicities and diverse groups. Supporting Looked After Children, Children at risk of Sexual Exploitation, Children Missing Education, Post Looked After Children, Youth Offenders, Children with Specialist Educational Needs and Children in Need. Our expertise is not limited and we are keen to support other vulnerable groups to improve outcomes.

The ePEP platform provides a holistic area to record and measure the child’s educational performance, achievements, targets, aspirations, outcomes, concerns and self well-being. Helping professionals identify and implement interventions for improving educational quality and achieving better outcomes.

We continually work with young people to ensure their voices are heard by adapting the software to meet their expectations and changing needs. This has enabled us to offer a Young Persons Portal within ePEP to securely record important events, achievements and to capture bespoke answers to questions set by the Virtual School. Young People can also connect to ePEP Portal via a secure mobile APP which is optional.

We have worked extensively to support authorities in these challenging times by developing the streamlined COVID-19 PEP in partnership with Birmingham Council. This is now included within the ePEP standard features to support all teachers and professionals with in-out of school education. Our aim is to be as flexible and responsive as possible to meet all our clients requirements.

Our ePEP Attendance Collection Service integrates directly into the PEP and provides a simple and effective solution by sending external notifications and alerts to attendance officers. Authorities using the new automatic collection service have quickly benefited from the improved percentage and quality of DFE attendance data, linking into the PEP attendance profile page.

The eGOV support team will provide extra support to ensure designated attendance officers take up the new service and the complete daily or weekly electronic register. We can guarantee a quick improvement with PEP and attendance quality, teachers have welcomed the new remote approach and provided positive results across the country.

We provide access to our Self-Report Builder for clients to use within the platform for a completely unique approach to analysing data. This powerful application allows professionals to easily produce tailored reports, configure threshold alerts, conduct data mining, analyse and drill-down on all aspects of collected PEP and attendance data. Bespoke reports can be automatically generated weekly or shared between colleagues. Individual cohorts, school data, PEP completion, key-stage results, collected attendance, attainment data plus much more can be downloaded. This feature which has proven to be invaluable for many authorities.

Customisable Dashboards are available to quickly drill-down on key areas of focus and concern with large or individual cohorts. Attainment, progress, PEP completion, targets, attendance, quality assurance ratings, Look-up tables, drop-downs menus can be edited be the client to analyse the dashboards.

For more information visit:

https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/529063108447110

Electronic-Personal-Education-Plan

PEP completion rates increase

PEP completion rates have significantly increased for authorities using ePEP’s new feature (Mandatory Data Fields).

System administrators can now customise the professional section within ePEP’s user matrix to ensure Social workers and Designated teachers complete important data requirements and questions.

The system alerts professionals if targets are not completed

PEP’s are not completed within  timescale, and when a PEP meeting has been organised. The ePEP alert notification is sent via external e-mail and duplicated to the internal messaging system.

The PEP meeting can be completely organised remotely allowing the administrator to set the venue and time of the meeting.

Invitations will be automatically sent to all individuals connected to the child via e-mail, saving a significant amount of time on the telephone.

The platform can link directly into databases for education social care.

Collecting vital information about the child before the meeting takes place this saves any duplication from the social worker or designated teacher.

Communication between professionals online plays a significant role with increasing the speed and efficiency of PEP completion.

The Social worker can support the Designated teacher prior to the meeting ensuring the child’s voice is heard. Teachers can also track termly attainment automatically with information gathered from the Sims database or any other supplier. Attainment data it can also be collected manually on the child by the designated teacher. Historical results for all Key stages are chronologically recorded within ePEP.

Reports can be generated into XML spreadsheets or graphically illustrated within the main ePEP dashboard.

Widgit Symbols

One of the great features of ePEP are the sections for the young people to complete using interactive avatars. The young person has numerous options to choose from, children with reading difficulties or a visual impairment significantly benefit from the spoken questions by the avatar.

This technique guarantees for whatever reason the child cannot read or has difficulty communicating by the written word to have their say.

The company has worked closely with Gloucestershire Council in developing a questionnaire for youngsters who have difficulty communicating using symbols used by Widgit Symbols software. Many local authorities already have access to Widgit software so can freely use the questionnaire in the SEN module of ePEP. This technique using symbols might look simple compared to ePEP’s under-water environment, however this could over excited SEN children. The symbols have been an overwhelming success with young people enabling them to easily participating with the familiar language.

Many SEN special schools are also very familiar with these symbols.

More Information about Widgit Symbols

The ever expanding Widgit Symbols Set has been terms of the past 30 years and now contains more than 12,000 symbols, which cover an English vocabulary of over 40,000 words. Widgit’s simply-drawn, colourful symbols each illustrate a single concept, in a clear and concise way, and cover a range of topics (including many curricular areas) wide enough to make them suitable for symbol users of all ages and abilities.

Widgit Symbols are used all over the world, supporting 17 languages, increasing the accessibility of written text, giving readers of all literacy levels greater access to information. As the Widgit Symbols Set is designed specifically for written information, Widgit Symbols users can develop a real independence in the reading and writing.

The new Widgit Symbols Set was launched in October 2002. This is a result of a two year development project involving many practitioners.

More information on the design rules and schema

More information about the development project

widgit-symbols

widgit-symbols

Information about Widgit Symbols from www.widgit.com

Pupil-Premium-Plus

Pupil Premium Plus

Additional funds for children in care become available from April 2014 through the Pupil Premium Plus (PP+). Besides increasing the amount to £1900 per child, the funds will be available from the first day a child comes in to care.

The Virtual School head in each local authority will be responsible for administrating the Pupil Premium Plus (PP+). Any spend will have to be accounted through the child’s personal education plan and will have to be targeted on the educational needs of the young person. If the local authority fails to distribute the allocated funds they will be clawed back by the government.

It is statutory that every child in care, in education, should have an up to date Personal Education Plan. The government is making it a requirement that details of the Pupil Premium will need to be recorded in the PEP and how it addresses their educational needs This will make the local authority and schools more accountable.

Schools can expect Ofsted to look in detail how the Pupil Premium is spent for individual children in care.

Department of Education Pupil Premium website

Ofsted School Inspection Handbook