“One size fits no one.”
Staff and resident workshops 2023
The organisation
As a unitary local authority, we provide and coordinate a huge range of services in the community. This includes statutory adult social care and children’s services, as well as education, early help and community support. We manage local parks, community facilities, planning, and local leisure facility contracts.
Our aspiration is to have a thriving local community with resilient residents and businesses.
There are good examples across our services or working jointly with people. However, specifically co-producing services could be extended and used more widely. The council has traditionally been versatile in approach but most comfortable developing proposals, with some community engagement, and then consulting on them rather than co-producing.
The initial priority will be to further develop and enhance co-production within the People directorate. However, this is a council wide framework and other directorates are encouraged to use co-production where appropriate. This framework sets out our approach to co-production when used in any service.
There will be further opportunities to explore and develop co-production in areas such as addressing climate change, developing community initiatives and in working on a range of issues with our partners including health and the voluntary, community and faith sector. The associated toolkit will be the practical guide to support co-production for all our services.
Our values
The council and our staff seek to model 3 values, to be inclusive, ambitions and always learning.
Enhancing our approach to co-production is an opportunity to demonstrate all 3 values.
Inclusive
In every interaction and communication, we seek to listen and understand. We make sure there is a collaborative culture of openness and honesty. We respect individuality, diversity and wide ranging perspectives.
Co-production enables us to work with residents, gain a better understanding and benefit from their experience and skills. When used effectively, it will help us build meaningful and trusting relationships.
Ambitious
Through our determination, we aspire to excellence and adding value in everything that we do. We are bold but realistic. We work together and treat others as we would expect ourselves or families to be treated.
Using co-production in a more consistent and enhanced way is different and ambitious. We know it will take commitment of time and resources but this framework, the toolkit, training and ongoing support will enable us to increase our skills and the extent it can be used.
Always learning
We strive for continuous improvement, proactively seeking development opportunities, reflecting, and learning from experience.
Using co-production effectively means we will adapt how services are delivered. There is good evidence that co-production can achieve improved outcomes. This requires reflection on learning from a range of people and also the development of co-production skills across the organisation.
Governance
We are establishing the governance process for identifying suitable projects, monitoring co-production outcomes and allocating appropriate resources.
We know appropriate governance is required to:
- provide clarity and transparency over the progress of co-production activity
- make sure we can provide the resources required to do it well
- make sure that we are all consistently working towards the ambitions set out within this framework
- understand any challenges that are making co-production difficult to achieve
When we agree the governance mechanism, we will make sure the process balances learning and reflection without creating a barrier through reporting requirements. It will provide us with a good opportunity to increase our collective understanding locally about successful outcomes and challenges experienced.