Designing for Systems Change: New approaches to partnerships in children’s social care
In the children’s social care sector, we work on sensitive issues every day across the UK and the challenges faced by children. Navigating and responding to this complexity, while operating in an environment of shrinking budgets and increasing needs, is a huge challenge to us all.
Yet, too often we work as separate entities, with our own language, culture and measurements rather than to a collective vision. If we are to create environments where both children and our workforces thrive — not survive — we have to work smarter together and build new cultures of cooperation and co-creation across the sector. We must also engage with inspiring best practices and know where it works well.
At Barnardo’s, the service design team and our colleagues in Children’s Services have been testing a design-led approach with Leicestershire County Council as part of our strategic relationship in the Children’s Innovation Partnership. We’ve been building the collective skills, capabilities and ideas for how we solve some of the toughest challenges facing children and a platform for ideas .
It’s new, emergent and exciting, and at the end of our first year of a potential ten-year strategic partnership we want to share with you the journey we are on, our learnings, and how this is building a more ‘systems-informed’ approach to our work at Barnardo’s (see our previous blog posts on exploring Systems Change at Barnardo’s).
How are we approaching design-led partnerships?
Here I’ll outline what we saw, the challenges and what we did about it, using our design-led approach in partnerships.
Our starting point — the brief
Our starting point with our local authority partner was to respond to a design brief: “When is residential care the right placement for a looked-after child?”
When a child cannot be in their own home or with family, one alternative can be residential care. With Leicestershire County Council staff, we agreed this is usually a child of secondary school age, but the demographics actually show a younger and younger age group being accommodated in residential care.
Together we recognised that residential care placements too often broke down for a child and that a child was often placed in residential care following exhaustion of either the foster or adoption market.
Residential placements are the highest in cost to the local authority, most resource-heavy, and far too often are perceived as the “last choice” or “last chance” for a child.
Solution: Reframe, from reactive to preventative — go upstream
We needed to change our narrative around how we looked at the problem and where it sat in the system.
As a project design lead, my role and that of my colleague Laura Malan was to facilitate a collective inquiry by defining the problem space, the boundary and the approach to how we work together. In doing so, we recognised that the problem is bigger than being placed in residential care, it’s how the whole process responds to the child’s needs, across their care journey. So we expanded the problem space to look at the contributing root causes, factors and patterns, earlier in the child’s placement journey. In doing so, we shift the focus to go from reactive to preventative.
Working in new ways feels unfamiliar
We recognised at the start, that it might feel unfamiliar and potentially scary to embrace design-led approaches, particularly when it uses a new language and might potentially feel different from how we have done it before. Also, we acknowledged that when a member of staff participates in a design workshop, they might be coming directly from supporting a child in crisis. So we needed to ask how can the process flex and fit with our local authority partner’s staff’s needs and capacity? How can we create a space for the role of design and value this from the start?
“Our role as designers is to create new spaces and opportunities to think differently, build capacity and capabilities for impact.”
Solution: creating space for practitioners to think differently, right from the start
We proposed a different way of working, one which took different routes to achieve our aspired shared outcomes. In doing so, we’ve taken a different journey, of non-linear working, which has collectively taken us forward in a new direction.
Here are some of our design-led principles which helped us do this.
- Building an intentional culture of how we work
We intentionally set the conditions for how we collaborate upfront at the very start of the project. As partners, we defined our shared values, the rhythms and frequency in which we would come together the design process, and our story for how we communicate the work across the local authority.
2. A co-located, collaborative team
We embedded ourselves in our partner organisation and built a diverse team of locally-led and national experts from across both partner organisations. We had trauma-informed practitioners (Mandy Goodenough and Holly Morrall), research and evaluation partners, youth advisors and senior leaders championing and navigating our work.
We co-located to Leicestershire County Council, in the Children and Family Department, for a proportion of our working week. This helped us to build mutual trust and recognition of each other’s work, knowledge and culture.
3. Start by valuing what is there, champion what is being done well
As just one part of a big operation, my role was to facilitate and catalyse a safe and non-judging space for staff and children — who are experts of their own experience — to come together in.
We did this by valuing and championing what is already being done well and drawing attention to opportunities to improve whilst being centred around the child. We worked with diverse groups of staff from the local authority, to surface their best practices around how and when a child is communicated with when moving homes; to how to recruit and speak with children and young people with experience of residential homes, under Leicestershire County Council’s care.
We worked directly with support workers caring for this cohort and together, we carefully crafted the invitations to jointly run engagement sessions with staff, in the child’s home or preferred setting.
4. Establishing a multiplicity of views
Using design processes we encouraged different perspectives and views to share the same space. We helped staff and children unlock their knowledge to find new approaches together. We ran workshops with staff and separately with children to surface their needs, gaps and opportunities.
We mapped out collectively both staff and child’s journey into a new home; and tested the ideas we heard together in co-design workshops.
It is all about starting with the child’s needs.
5. Not jumping straight to solutions
We tested a new approach to the brief by not jumping straight to ‘solutions’ but valuing time spent understanding the problem area with children and staff experiencing it upfront.
6. Go beyond traditional responses
Traditional responses to a brief don’t go far enough, and tend to follow linear phases of ‘Design-Implementation-Evaluation’, following processes which are pre-determined and often have pre-empted solutions, falling to ‘business as usual’ knowledge.
Design-led responses, like the one we have tested in our partnership, takes a non-linear process of divergent thinking — exploring the issues more widely or deeply, and convergent thinking, taking focussed action through co-defining ideas and solutions together, co-creating multiple new outcomes.
Our job as designers is to hold that space for practitioners — staff and those experiencing challenges — to think differently and to guide those conversations.
7. A portfolio approach to create transformational change
We co-developed a ‘portfolio’ of approaches and opportunities that intervene across the system, beyond a single solution, to move towards longer-term systemic impact for children.
It is not necessarily about creating a new service to fit a gap, but having a number of different responses and interventions to the issues presented — from policy and advocacy to small changes in day to day process, actions and behaviours.
This includes:
- child-centred communications such as the tools, touchpoints, channels and ways we communicate a change with a child (such as a residential move)
- trauma-informed training and the language we use around risk in front of a child and other audiences
- a more joined-up decision-making process and a single child-centred assessment process implemented much earlier on in the child’s care journey.
These potential opportunities could address different levels of change in the system over different time periods. Taken from the Social Designers Pathway, we plotted ‘level of collaboration’ against ‘scale of impact’, taking us towards systems change — or more system-informed. The opportunity pathways present a starting point, to test and co-design, with staff and children, how we scale solutions addressing challenges identified.
As each is tested and built upon, more ideas will populate the grid and the ambition is that the level of change is moving towards ‘systemic’ in impact.
Building the innovation skill set
In leading with a design-led process in the local authority, we’re building more than just services and products, but the capability, skills, culture and infrastructure for innovation in our future workforce and the sector.
Inspired by learnings from Nesta’s competency framework on the key skills, attitudes and behaviours needed for public sector innovation, together we recognise this requires continued learning and practice if we are to create together a space for innovation in the sector.
If the speed of change is directly related to the relationships we are forming in the sector, we are on a new exciting path with our strategic partners.
We acknowledge that we need to shift the role that we play beyond service provider to convenor, catalyser and co-designer in the sector. This is a culture change in the way we work internally and externally in local authorities.
To hold the space to reflect and consider, and ensure children’s needs are at the centre of what we do, we’re enabling our colleagues and staff to feel more confident in their work, and build space for strategic changes. In our partnerships, we are building these new capabilities and the structures, within our organisation and beyond, which allow us to be adaptive, responsive, mission-focused, system-informed and child-centred.
Nurturing new roles and new approaches in children’s social care beyond services is part of our #FutureBarnardos mission to design the next generation of social care, together with the rest of the sector.
Gemma is a Strategic Designer in the Barnardo’s Digital & Technology team and Project Design Lead on the Children’s Innovation Partnership, a strategic partnership between with Leicestershire County Council and Barnardos. The partnership is led by Nadine Good, Assistant Director in Children’s Services — who we’re grateful to for embracing this new way of working.
We’re also grateful for the support from strategist and designer Laura Malan on the work and the Service Design team.
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