An Award Winning Year for MAST, plus national recognition in practice reviews
The Multi Agency Safeguarding Tracker MAST has been recognised with two leading awards in the last few weeks; winning the Aligned Public Service Delivery Award at the Public Finance Awards 2022, then taking the ESG Privacy Initiative Award at the Picasso Awards just two weeks later.
Following two years of information governance definition, platform build and detailed data work, this is clear acknowledgement of the approach, the partners, and the real and clear value MAST delivers. Key partners who drove the creation of MAST include Walsall Council, West Midlands Police, West Midlands Fire & Rescue, Walsall Healthcare Trust, Policy in Practice, and CC2i.
MAST brings real-time, headline data together from each of the safeguarding partners and presents it to support safeguarding professionals to understand the latest interactions or interventions with a person or address. In MAST they are able to immediately check whether someone has attended A&E, has an open Adults or Children’s case, had a blue light call out, and how many there have been over the last 12 months.
Judges at the Public Finance Awards said MAST won due to “an impressive story about the real-world benefits of sharing data to improve public service delivery”.
Back in May, the National Review into the deaths of Arthur Labinjo-Hughes and Star Hobson said:
“Problems with information sharing have been raised by every national child protection review and inquiry – going back as far as the inquiry into the death of Maria Colwell in 1973. They have also been a central theme in all triennial analysis of serious cases (Sidebotham et al., 2016; Brandon et al., 2020) and in the Panel’s two annual reports (CSPRP, 2020b; CSPRP, 2021c). Time and again we see that different agencies hold pieces of the same puzzle but no one holds all of the pieces or is seeking to put them together.”
“Good data and technology is part of the solution and smarter data systems can help build up our system defences and reduce the potential for errors to occur (Reason, J. 2000). Effective data systems is something we already expect for professionals operating in other high risk contexts, for example, counter terrorism and aviation. We must now expect the same for professionals working to protect some of the most vulnerable in society.
MAST has been designed specifically to be the solution to address this perennial issue and was cited as a ‘promising project’ in the report.
In addition to presentations and discussions with DfE, regional safeguarding partnerships, WM ADASS, LOTI et al, MAST was referenced in the Centre of Social Justices’ response to the McAllister review.
In terms of the Picasso Privacy Awards, MAST took the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) award. Judges said of MAST:
“Privacy within ESG has to become a key trigger that we need to think outside the box and logically about our information and how it can support the environment, social care communities, and so on. It has to be a time when privacy is leading the way, not sitting behind waiting to be asked a question. We have to be out there now saying that we can do this better if we come up with logical solutions.”
MAST was also a finalist in the Big Data category in the Digital Leaders Awards earlier in the year.
As we work with local authorities and their safeguarding partners across the West Midlands, South Wales and London, we hope to support more safeguarding professionals, vulnerable people, families and communities moving into 2023. MAST is a result of true public sector collaboration and was born out of the Social Care Digital Innovation Accelerator 2020/21, which CC2i ran on behalf of the LGA.
