Largest UK children's charity may be putting vulnerable kids at risk. Rob Ray reports.

Staff are complaining that a new electronic information system installed late last year at the NSPCC is not working properly. The Children's Recording Information System (CRIS) is designed to record and electronically store information collected by the Services for Children and Young People (SCYP) section of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) on one database. The SCYP deals directly with the protection of vulnerable children, yound people and families, in other words the NSPCC's core work.

A senior director at the NSPCC has denied claims that the
database is not fit for purpose. But information received by Corporate Watch from an insider suggests that the new computer system could be potentially disasterous.

The new system was part of the NSPCC's response to the outcome of the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié. The eight-year old died in 2000 having suffered from severe neglect and physical abuse. Local authority social workers were heavily criticised for a string of short-comings and mistakes and their failure to intervene. At the time, the NSPCC along with other child welfare agencies was also criticised for failures in communication and a lack of information in the months leading to Climbié's death.

It seems that NSPCC may now have difficulties keeping its house in order in terms of monitoring its child welfare cases.
CRIS was designed by BancTec, a firm specialising in providing IT for financial and commercial organisations. After a short testing period the new system was brought in with the entirety of the NSPCC going online with at the same time.

Our insider informed us that since the new system was set up
there have been a wide range of complaints made by staff on the charity.

Updated versions of CRIS, in late December and in early
January, have failed to improve matters, according to our
source who said that complaints included:

• Time wasted due to slow service; some users complaining of entire mornings waiting to load simple files
• Lost recordings
• Staff needing to keep backups on paper, effectively running two systems for one job (CRIS is supposed to minimise the need for paper files)
• Increased staff workload
• Search system behaving erratically, and crucially it can give wrong results
• Search missing some cases entirely, for example one of two brothers disappearing
• Inability to properly attribute case notes of volunteers
• Hard drive shutdowns preventing saving of work.

In October and November last year, internal emails from people working with the system concluded that CRIS was 'dangerous' and 'unworkable'. In December, still staff complained that cases are still 'stuck' in the system. One staff member said,

'The bottom line for me is that, apart from the functionality issues, CRIS is clearly not fit for purpose as a casework recording and management tool...In some cases the system won't take two people working on it at the same time in the same office and it crashes. There's new special measures in place and people have gone back to using paper records. It won't be back until February, and that's official policy. People are saying they have spent half a day to do one entry. In terms of the day-to-day system it seems to be worse since the [January] release. And it's still not properly searchable, people are looking for things they have put in themselves and it's not showing up. The most recent talk is of a boycott of the system.'

When questioned on this, Wes Cuell, director of Services for children and young people, denies the system is failing. Cuell, who in an October email said he would 'take personal responsibility' for any technical problems with the system said,

'There were concerns in the first few weeks about CRIS that data wasn't being found but that's not the case now. We
are very confident that the data is reliable... We have a lot of people saying it works really well now and some saying it's still got problems. We are increasingly looking at people rather than the software and some people have got themselves
into a bit of a mindset that CRIS won't work properly. But we do have a lot of people saying it's a big improvement.'

A message to the internal list on 18th January, handed over by our insider, disagrees with the assessment that it is a staff problem and points out that a search of the system brought up three pages of names that could not be put into alphabetical order because of a glitch even after confirmed the system was updated, a problem confirmed by a support officer who noted it was 'not currently working'. According to our insider the problems are continuing...