We’re very lucky in Lambeth for two reasons: firstly we were chosen as
an implementation partner by the new economics
foundation (nef) to implement
and test out the co-production
and outcomes based commissioning approach and secondly because Lambeth as a
Council is going co-operative
– which means that the implementation project is supported and driven by a
corporate priority.
Lambeth Council agreed to become a co-operative borough in January 2011
and the idea is to ‘turn the Town Hall on its head’. We want to provide services
that do things with people rather
than to people. At its core, it’s
about shifting power to people so they have more control over their lives.
This is particularly relevant to children and young people because they often
feel that they have little say in their lives and are usually controlled by
grown-ups who, though well intentioned, don’t necessarily listen to what they
truly want. There is also a perception that young people don’t know what’s best
for them, or that they don’t have the attention spans to get involved in Local
Authority processes, which can be dry and unduly bureaucratic.
I have been working with three young people supported by the Youth
Offending Service and, although it can be a challenge, they are interested,
they do know what they want and they want to contribute their time and energy
into something that could help improve the lives of their peers. The main challenge
for us is making it interesting and really valuing their time and effort. We
have used appreciative enquiry approaches to help the group realise their
visions and develop a dream for a safe and ‘cool’ Lambeth. These young people
are now going out into their communities to interview other young people and
community members to collect their dreams and identify ways in which everyone
can contribute.
Of course, we are working with a lot more than just three young people! In
the new year we will be working with a much larger group of young people, all
members of the newly developed Young Lambeth Co-op, to go out and collect
people’s dreams. These will then be collated and presented back to the
community and Council.
All of these dreams will be fed into the needs and assets assessment.
This is a very different approach to the timed needs assessment which is done
before a commissioning round. We want to
get away from thinking about gaps and issues which can focus too heavily on the
negatives and things that are lacking in a young person’s life to find out what
is working, what young people value and who and what they think is important in
their community. Talking to young people about what they value and enjoy makes
for much more energising conversations; they’re being asked to talk about things
they feel passionate about rather than dwelling on their anxieties and giving
them reasons to moan.
We’re using some innovative approaches – asking young people to build
models with Lego and physically map services and projects which are already
providing a positive contribution. We are also employing school council members
to go out and interview other children and young people in the class room and
playground. And this is only the start. We realise that there are many young
people who traditionally haven’t been involved in conversations including
children with disabilities and special educational needs as well as some groups
from specific ethnic groups. We want to develop approaches to ensure their
voices are heard. We also want to keep this sort of engagement continuous
rather than isolated to help us to maintain our relationships with young people
and build wider networks past the usual suspects.
The needs and asset mapping will inform the development of the outcomes
framework which we will then use to commission services against. The process
started with a clustering exercise which led to identifying all the priorities
and outcomes from Children and Young People’s Services and the wider Council.
These were then grouped together using the Dynamic
Model of Wellbeing as a framework.
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This conceptual model was developed by nef in response to the debate on measuring human well-being. It
describes how an individual’s external conditions (bottom left) – such as their
income, employment status, housing and social context – act together with their
personal resources (bottom right) – such as their health, resilience and
optimism – to allow them to function well (middle) in their interactions with
the world and therefore experience positive emotions (top). This model also
shows how having good overall feelings (and a positive evaluation of those
feelings) is dependent on functioning well.
The results of the clustering exercise were quite significant in that
nearly all of the Council’s outcomes were based on external factors with only
one or two measuring functionings or personal resources. This has given us a
clear direction for co-production with young people and our aim is to populate
the ‘functionings’ and ‘personal resources’ areas with outcomes that have been
identified by young people through our workshops, dream collection and peer
interviews.
Once the outcomes framework has been populated sufficiently, the next
stage will be to commission using outcomes drawn from all three areas –
functionings, personal resources and external factors – to ensure providers are
delivering activities that develop the functionings of a young person, enabling
them to experience ‘good feelings’. In addition to this, outcomes will also be
chosen across the triple bottom line – economic, social and environmental – so
that services are demonstrating value for money.
We have our work cut out for us as time is of the essence and most of
this needs to be spent building relationships not only with young people but
also community anchors, service providers and the wider community. We need to
make sure we’re all approaching this with the same vision as their buy-in is as
important as the approach itself.