Ealing Council: Seamless Scalability for Essential Youth Programmes

The client

Ealing Council provides essential community services, including the delivery of the Holiday Activities & Food (HAF) Programme, which supports children and young people in need.

We have been working in partnership with Ealing Council since September 2021, with HAF projects running through our Milestone platform since March 2023. This collaboration has streamlined the management of HAF funding and provider payments, reducing administrative burdens and ensuring efficient programme delivery.

The challenge

Ealing Council needed an efficient way to run the HAF programme within its borough. The HAF programme, funded by the Department for Education, provides holiday provision, including healthy food and enriching activities, for children and young people in reception to year 11 who receive benefits-related free school meals.

Managing this programme posed significant challenges for the council, particularly for their finance team, which was responsible for processing payments to multiple providers. Without seamless scalability built into their processes, growing the programme risked adding further strain to an already stretched finance and administration team.

Core challenges centred around manually paying all involved suppliers (including an audit trail), as well as conducting background checks on suppliers and managing communications across multiple providers.

Our solution

Using our Matrix Prism platform, we provided Ealing Council and its HAF programme with a fully auditable solution. This helped the Council to award new projects to HAF providers; reducing the manual workload for the Council’s finance and administration teams:

• Improved Processes: Through Matrix Prism, Ealing Council could onboard over 45 suppliers with a structured and simplified process
• Dedicated Support: Our comprehensive onboarding approach allowed the Council to provide training and support to suppliers, building lasting relationships
• Reliable Payments: Our Matrix Payroll automated solution kept suppliers paid without the need for constant effort on the finance team’s behalf
• Increased Productivity: All of these benefits freed up time for the Council’s internal resources, allowing teams to focus on other priorities

The results

• Structured onboarding for 45+ suppliers, ensuring compliance and accountability
• Enabled automated payment processing via Matrix Payroll
• Helped essential youth engagement to scale with ease

The outcome

Our partnership with Ealing Council has significantly improved the efficiency and scalability of the HAF programme, resulting in holistic improvements:

• Reliable Network: Over 45 suppliers were vetted and onboarded for participation in the HAF programme
• Clarity & Transparency: By utilising Matrix Prism, Ealing Council could generate a fully auditable and automated process
• Strength in Structure: The scalability of this new approach helps Ealing Council to run 3 HAF programmes every year, each with two automated payment schedules (start and finish) for all suppliers