Liquidlogic Children's System (LCS) Livelink Guidance

1. What is Liquidlogic Children's System (LCS)?

Essentially, LCS is an integrated, framework of records for children from the point of Referral (to Children's Services) to Closure. Information received prior to contact/referral on LCS will be recorded on the Liquidlogic Early Help Module (EHM). LCS also contains the records of Hertfordshire's Foster Carers and Adopters, capturing they're respected recruitment processes and ongoing work post approval.

The key purpose of LCS is to provide frontline staff and managers with a tool to record, collate, analyse and output key information about children/young people and their families. It provides a business process to support practitioners and managers in undertaking the key tasks of assessment, planning, intervention and review in accordance with legislation.

2. LCS - Why has it Been Developed?

LCS has been developed in response to the findings of inspections, research and inquiries and this is an ongoing process.

The use of information required for recording the facts and events of children's lives, and for assessing the needs of children and monitoring their developmental progress is fundamental to good, safe practice and better outcomes. Central to many of the inspection findings into children's social care has been the failure to record, retrieve and understand the significance of information about children.

3. The Aims of LCS

The aims of LCS are that:

• Information on the child/young person, foster carers and adopters is available to workers, managers and Performance Management colleagues simultaneously;
• Assessments of children in need should be completed with the necessary detail and within the required timescales;
• Case-based information can be aggregated to support service planning moving forwards and to enable Hertfordshire to meet its statutory reporting obligations to the Department for Education.

4. Who Uses LCS?

LCS is primarily used by social work teams across children's services including social workers, their managers, children's practitioners, adult workers, fostering Supervising Social Workers, Adoption Workers and support officers. Other stakeholders including education, health and police colleagues will also have limited access to LCS or the information within it, to ensure that information is shared in an effective way with external agencies.

5. Guidance and Training to Use LCS

New starters will be given read-only access to LCS until they have completed the necessary training for their role. All new users must undertake online iLearn+ training - on completion of the module(s), they will then be given appropriate write-access to the system. Other modules are available for staff depending on their role and team. Information on the various modules available is accessible on the intranet. See LCS Training information.

There is a full library of guidance manuals on the different areas of LCS available on the intranet See LCS Guidance.

6. Livelink - What is it and How it Should be Used

Livelink is Hertfordshire's corporate electronic document records management system (EDRMS).

It is the only storage repository for all documents and records relating to a children/young people with records on LCS.

A Livelink child/young person file is automatically created at the point of which a Contact or a Single Service Request (SSR) is finalised in LCS.

Templates used within LCS have been mapped so that a copy is automatically saved in the appropriate Child file subfolder in Livelink. Forms and templates generated in LCS will remain there, but a duplicate copy will map across to Livelink.

Livelink iLearn training, quick reference guides, generic business processes and FAQ's are available at: Children's Services Livelink Homepage.