The London Roadshow a co-production finale!

[Julia]

The London co-production roadshow was the culmination of the five UK wide events that nef, NESTA, the co-production practitioners’ network and a range of partners, have been facilitating.

The day got off to a great start with a keynote from Philip Colligan, the executive director of NESTA’s public services lab. He talked about the imperative of co-production, and how it responded to a real need for a different approach to public services, one which delivers services with people, rather than doing things to them. He drew upon a couple of great examples of co-production – including LAC, and how they had shown a shift in services towards a more preventative model that had demonstrated significant cost savings.

Then Gavin Jones, the Chief Executive of Swindon council spoke about the changes his council had made to their services for families at risk of multiple exclusion which integrate some of the core principles of co-production, such as an asset based way of working. The change process they have been through is remarkable, and Gavin’s commitment showed the importance of leadership when developing co-produced services. 

The event then proceeded in quite a different way to other conferences. Participants were put into groups who stayed together for the day, decided on a set of learning outcomes for the day, and got to interview three ‘expert witnesses’. These witnesses of were practitioners of co-production who were able to share their experience and insight, and respond to participant’s questions.

We ‘interviewed’ three people. Sian Lockwood, who spoke about her experience with Shared Lives and Community Catalysts. Emma Main from the Holy Cross Centre Trust – a mental health day service in London, and two people involved in projects with SILK and ActiveMobs. Some interesting ideas emerged;

• Holy Cross has introduced a time bank into their day service. This has really increased the capacity they have to run events, and gives everyone in the service a chance to participate and contribute. They operate by the mantra ‘’don’t do anything anyone can do for themselves’’. But Emma also made it clear that co-production is anything but easy. ‘’It takes a huge amount of energy to work with people’’. In  fact, Holy Cross have been actively looking at the skills needed by professionals to co-produce: when they ask time bankers what they like to see in staff, words like ‘empathy’ and ‘warmth’ are used, in place of ‘monitor’, or ‘implement’
• SILK and Activemobs follow a methodology which goes through ‘Initiate, Create, Test and Define’ as an iterative approach to developing services. One participant noted that this flips the traditional model of services on its head, which usually defines the problem or need first, before initiating action. Following SILKs methodology, services become more personalised, and suited to the community or group intended to benefit from them.
• Our group wanted a definition of co-production as a key learning outcome. One was offered by Activemobs, who said that;

‘’Co-production is the blindingly obvious. You need to involve all those people who are going to be using services in designing, creating and producing them’’.

Many of the questions which surfaced throughout the day were linked to definitions of co-production, and whether or not there was an evidence base to show it resulted in good value for money. There were also a lot of questions about how co-production could become a more mainstream approach in public services – with the ever challenging discussions on ‘scale’. What it means, and how to achieve it, remained an elusive topic in our group.

[Francesca Cignola]

Check out materials and videos from the event on NESTA's website