Case Study - Kent County Council
Kent County Council is the largest local authority in England covering an area of 3,500 square kilometres and a population of 1.3M. The Early Years and Childcare Unit of the Children, Families and Education directorate of Kent County Council, oversees the development of early years education and childcare in the county.
As part of their commitment to providing the highest class of childcare each year the Council issues a survey to all 3,000 or so OfSTED registered providers of early education and childcare within the county. On average, around 15,000 individual survey forms are produced, comprising some 300,000 pages. The survey forms are collated into approximately 3,000 unique packs.
The Council needed a supplier to provide an end-to-end solution encompassing the complex printing, assembly and fulfilment but also receipt of completed forms, response tracking, reminders and provision of response data electronically all within tight deadlines. After a successful tendering process, Document Options was selected to provide the solution.
Each page of each form is produced uniquely for each individual recipient using variable data provided by the Council and the packs mailed out to the childcare providers along with pre-printed reply paid envelopes and personalised introductory letters.
The completed surveys arrive back at our offices and are checked in using a unique barcode system, enabling us to keep track of which recipients have replied and which have not. Reminder letters are sent to recipients whom we have not responded within a certain time. All completed survey forms are scanned and the responses captured into a database which is then securely transported to the Council in SPSS compatible format. On average, a total of approximately 2 million characters of data are captured from the survey responses.
Dr Tony Alderton had this to say “the annual provider survey is a vital piece of research that enables Kent County Council to fulfil its duties to both central Government and members of the general public to provide high quality, affordable, accessible early education and childcare for all those who need it. It is a massive exercise, in fact the largest of its kind in the country, and the work that Document Options do for us in this respect is invaluable. They have worked for us on this project on a number of occasions now and have been very proactive in ensuring that the service they provide gets better and better each year. It is unlikely that the survey could be carried out in the time-frames required and as efficiently as needed without the input of Document Options”.
