Prior’s Court is a registered charity providing education and residential care for autistic young people with complex needs, aged 5-25. Set within a 50-acre site in Berkshire, they have extensive bespoke facilities to help the young people they support to be healthy, happy, more independent and have the opportunity to access the world of work.
Onboarding a single IT platform solution at Prior's Court involved overcoming significant challenges related to complexity of needs, data integration, user training and adoption, and stakeholder engagement. Addressing these challenges required careful planning, a phased implementation approach, and ongoing support to ensure the platform met the organisation's needs and improved its operational efficiency.
Prior’s Court was one of the first partners to implement all of Zone’s modules using it to run and manage all of their services. This includes their school timetabling, staff rotas across multiple sites, care plans, behavioural support, risk assessments and incident management.
Prior's Court continue to see benefits of the insights gained from using a single IT platform. Given the complex nature of their support to individuals in both an educational and residential setting, this has proven to be very useful to improve Prior's Court quality of support. Staff teams have improved the way they coordinate and communicate across multiple teams, which has led to improved efficiency and productivity. This has led to better support for the individuals at Prior's Court and helped Prior’s Court to retain its Ofsted 'Outstanding' Education and Ofsted 'Good' Care status. The Young Adult Provision homes at Prior's Court are all rated as 'Good' by the CQC.
Prior’s Court residents move on to a new home when they turn 25. Clare and her team are very keen to make this transition as smooth as possible. Well documented and up to date resident records, complete with insights on the individual, help them to best prepare a new team to support their new resident through this transition.
Clare particularly likes the ability to forward plan using the system, by making sure rotas are complete and training requirements are met well ahead of time. Staff can also plan and manage their own workload by picking-up extra shifts and managing their schedules. Senior colleagues are able to track short cancellations of shifts and absence levels, looking at a calendar view and delving into the detail to understand patterns, picking-up a lot more that isn’t visible in manual records.
For those in management positions, like Clare, it allows them to step-back from the day-to-day operations, and use the data to get a birds-eye view of their team and activities. When Prior’s Court are subject to an Ofsted inspection, Zone supports them in providing reports and insights that clearly evidence their impact. They regularly receive excellent feedback from local authorities on the quality and depth of their reporting.
Freeing-up Clare’s time has been transformational.
“Zone has been really positive. In the past, certain actions would have taken me 10 times longer to complete.”
