We were recently asked, for the third year in succession, to work with an Authority to complete their Children’s Statutory Returns (Looked After Children Return, Children in Need Census, Ofsted Placement Return) and provide additional general reporting support, as several members of their team were leaving.

In previous years, we have worked closely with the internal team, but this year we managed the entire process for all returns, simply keeping the manager informed weekly of progress.

As anyone who has been involved with the returns will know, the process if fairly laborious, especially when it comes to clearing the errors before submission, but by carrying out several ‘sanity’ checks before uploading the data, the error count was minimised.

Our developer checked that the statistics matched the departments’ expectations and, once everyone was satisfied, even produced the sign off sheets for the Returns to be agreed by their Director.

The department manager has commented positively on how smoothly the returns had been completed and how easy it was to leave the Key Intelligence developer to simply get on with the job unsupervised while the internal team stayed free for day-to-day operational reporting, something that had previously ground to a near-halt in ‘Returns season’.