Co-production: redesigning support for care leavers, with care leavers
Gayle Rice explains how a project in Scotland has involved young people in planning and designing care leavers’ services
When we work to improve services we tend to talk to people who have expert knowledge of change. These people are often involved in management and development, but how often do we include the expertise of people who use the services we are trying to change?
The answer is not often enough. However, there is evidence of a growing co-productive movement in social services; the tide of service design is changing.
A co-productive approach is one where service users and providers work together to identify and develop changes.
The Institute for Research and Innovation in Social Services (Iriss) set up a discussion project that brought together care leavers in Argyll and Bute with their corporate parents (including care and aftercare, social work, health, homelessness and education services) to address how we could better support service users’ social and emotional needs.
Importantly, this issue was chosen by service users themselves, and focused on responding to care leavers’ experiences of services.
Invaluable insight
At a series of workshops, care leavers created a timeline of a young person’s experience of leaving care, identifying opportunities to develop services, and selecting which ideas they wanted to take forward.
Among the ideas developed in the workshops was an electronic version of Pathways (the process and folder of forms that assist workers and young people to plan their leaving care package) to enable young people to own and share the document and feel empowered in the process, and a pack to incorporate the idea of keeping in touch with friends and family into leaving care plans.
Young people also wanted to know where they could access the internet for free in their area so they could stay connected to information, people and social spaces.
The discussion process empowered care leavers to challenge working methods and people in the system. One young person used the words “this is how it should be” in relation to making change happen. Managers and practitioners considered the process offered an opportunity to think more deeply about the way we do things and communicate with colleagues.
The way forward
Co-production should not just be used as a consultative listening exercise. It is practical, and works on the premise that people invest their time, knowledge, experience and ideas, and test and develop change. It can support people to challenge their professional assumptions, provide staff with autonomy to make changes happen, enable service users to see that their views are acted upon and encourage a positive culture of evaluation.
This way of working needs to be integrated into service improvement programmes, and Iriss will continue to work together with Argyll and Bute council on this. The council is in the process of developing a strategy that includes integrating care leavers’ views into service development.
Iriss’ project blog offers ideas, insights and recommendations for how a co-productive approach could be trialled, and has been used by Dundee council to test out co-productive working with care leavers in their area.
Gayle Rice is project manager of Iriss. You can read more about the project in the full report Redesigning support for care leavers .
