Co-design online with Brent Care Journeys

There is a gap in the measured outcomes for care-experienced and non-care experienced young people. Barnardo’s has invested significantly in trying to understand why the gap persists, and what we can do about it from both a practical and systemic point of view. This programme of work is called Care Journeys.

Our ambition

The ambition of Care Journeys is to ensure that young people who are care-experienced are as, or more likely, to be in positive destinations compared to their non-care experienced peers.

Our approach

We are working in partnership with Brent local authority to test and learn using an agile service design methodology, grounded in research; co-designing solutions with care-experienced young people themselves.

Previous research showed that the needs and experiences of young people who first come into the care system as young adults (16 or older) are little understood and there is currently little tailored provision for this group. In Brent over 40% of young people coming into care do so aged 16+ and this number is growing.

Challenges of co-design online compared to in-person workshops

Brent Alpha Lab started at the end of February 2021, in lockdown. Our group is made up of six care-experienced young people from Brent, Barnardo’s youth workers and one service designer.

Our co-designers are a diverse group of young people. Some are studying or working, some are caring for their families, some have experience of the criminal justice system, while others have recently arrived in the UK as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC).

What they share is an experience of coming into care in Brent as a teenager, and a passion for improving the children’s social care system.

We planned to meet weekly on Zoom, for a two-hour workshop, using a Miro board to capture our thoughts and ideas. It quickly became apparent that these were very challenging circumstances in which to form a new group and build the trust and rapport needed for successful co-design work.

Our co-designers were not keen on having their cameras on, making it difficult to pick up on non-verbal cues, and bringing everyone into the conversation equally.

We also discovered the phenomenon of double-Zooming, where some people were simultaneously in our conversation and another Zoom for school, college or other groups. We were competing for attention in a crowded space.

Our digital tools felt insufficient to recreate the immersive experience of in-person design workshops. Not everyone had access to laptops, and most people preferred joining by phone, but our digital whiteboard tool had very limited functionality for phone users. So, to ensure everyone was having a similar experience, we often ended up with one facilitator screen-sharing the whiteboard and doing all the notetaking, which felt less interactive and engaging.

We quickly learned that our expectations of being able to provide an interactive, digital experience for our co-designers was unrealistic, so we adapted and accepted our group time would be more conversational in nature.

These adaptations got us through the 10 weeks in which our workshops were online but it affected the pace we were able to move through the work, and the atmosphere of our group.

Online workshops felt more serious compared to the fun and playful atmosphere of in-person co-design work. This inevitably affected attendance, and after a couple of very low attendance weeks, we decided to pause the sessions until we could meet again in person.

As a practitioner it felt disappointing that we weren’t totally successful in creating a fun, safe, online space that invited our co-design group in and empowered them to reimagine the system anew. However, pragmatically, we could be proud of the progress our group was making and how we were slowly building momentum.

It was also a helpful reminder that space is an important enabler of creative, imaginative work. Asking care-experienced young people to do this from home — sometimes temporary placements where they might feel uncomfortable or unsafe — ultimately felt unsustainable.

Systems change in practice

Talking about systems change is hard. It is a new, abstract concept for most people. It was easy for our group to agree that the current system is broken and needs to be changed, but having ideas for changes that are systemic is less easy.

One way we approached this challenge was by focusing on our co-designers’ first-hand experiences, and then encouraging dialogue on what they felt were the root causes of those experiences. For example, a problem several young people told us about was the fact they did not know about funds they are entitled to, which meant they were missing out on financial support.

Initially, the group talked about the cause of this being care professionals who didn’t want young people to know about funding because they are “bad at their jobs” or “want young people to suffer”. But after exploring in more detail, the group considered that even when professionals have good intentions and are trying their best, there might be something in the way the system works that means young people miss out on funding.

We started asking how the system leads to these poor experiences and outcomes for young people. The question for us as a co-design group then became one of: is there anything we can do to change it?

Another key learning for us was the emerging tension between Barnardo’s ambition for systems change, and the ideas that most excited our co-designers.

When we were at the stage of prioritising our strongest ideas for further development and testing, the group prioritised ideas that were less about changing the system, and more about smaller, more tangible changes. Changing the system felt secondary.

Our group challenged the distinction between ideas that were focused on changing systems and those that brought more tangible and personal benefits. This duality felt false to them.

This gave the team an opportunity to reflect on how our organisation set the systems change agenda separately from our co-design spaces; how we could do this differently in the future; and how much we should focus on pursuing the systems change agenda, rather than responding to what we hear from the group; or whether it is possible to do both.

Looking forward

After 10 weeks of online conversations, our group has:

• started to get to know each other
• established the problem space
• come up with lots of different ideas
• looked at those ideas through a system change lens
• prioritised two ideas to take forwards.

Idea 01: A welcome pack for young people coming into Brent’s care

The first idea we are taking forwards is a welcome pack for young people coming into care for the first time as young adults. Our co-designers told us that the current experience of entering care is confusing, isolating and leaves young people without the basic items needed to feel at home.

We will develop our idea to help young people feel more welcomed, give them the items they need to be comfortable, and the information they need to successfully navigate their new environment.

Idea 02: A new complaints process for young people in Brent’s care

The second idea we are taking forwards is a new complaints process. Our co-designers told us that when something goes wrong with your care experience, it is difficult to know where to turn to get help and support. Those that had complained said the process was slow and confusing, with poor communication.

Throughout our conversations, themes of trusting relationships, increased transparency and rebalancing power dynamics have consistently emerged. We aim to build on these core themes as we develop our ideas.

In our next blog post we will talk about the next stage in our co-design process: prototyping and testing our ideas with other care-experienced young people and professionals in Brent. We’ve finally been able to meet in person and will share insights and learnings that comes from our new environment and evolving team dynamic.

Thank you to the Brent Care Journeys team, our amazing group of care-experienced co-designers and our partners at Brent local authority.

To keep in touch follow @barnardoslab on Twitter and read more about our work on the Barnardo’s Blog.

All photos from Unsplash.com