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Using System Dynamics in Children’s Social Care

The numbers of children and young people in care are rising across the country - placing pressure on local authorities, without necessarily improving outcomes for children. We’ve been working with four local authorities to see whether their own systems might hold some of the answers to why this is happening, and how the issue can be best managed. We’re sharing some of our early learning from this work in a new Insight Brief: Using System Dynamics in Children’s Social Care.  Our system dynamics work is supported by our collaborators at the Social Systems Design Lab at the Brown School of Social Work in St Louis.

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Following your hunches – changing how we think about evidence

This is the text of a speech delivered by Jenny North, our Deputy Director, at the Children & Young People Now Conference on 5th December 2018. Despite our very modern name, the Dartington Service Design Lab is a long-established research charity dedicated to improving the lives of children and young people by helping the systems and services which support them. We work with charities, local authorities, and funders to help them to strengthen the design, delivery, and monitoring of what they do. Our track record and learning over 50 years, particularly over the last ten, has convinced us we need to change the conversation about evidence. Something we’ve learned a lot about, and so talk a lot about, is that it’s not possible to get a ‘result’ from evaluation that can make you totally confident about your impact – even a Randomised Controlled Trial doesn’t tell you if it’ll work in the future and usually doesn’t explain exactly what led to a positive impac

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Supporting the #iwill Fund to deliver learning on youth social action

  I write this on the train back from Manchester, after an absorbing and challenging day with a group of #iwill Fund match funders, discussing whether it’s useful to think about youth social action (and specifically how to fund it) through the lens of ‘place’. This is one of a series of meetings and workshops that have been taking place since August when the work of the #iwill Fund Learning Hub kicked off.   Place-based funding hasn’t been the only thing we’ve been looking at – we’ve also brought people together on how to increase the take-up and quality of youth social action in education, and worked with match funders on how best to evaluate the social action they’re supporting. So who are we, and what are we up to? The first bit’s easy: the Learning Hub is a consortium of four organisations – Dartington Service Design Lab, Generation Change, Renaisi and the Centre for Youth Impact. We’re all bringing different strengths to the partnership

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Systems Thinking: Unlocking it’s potential to improve children’s outcomes

  Last month we held our first Dartington Service Design Lab lecture in Edinburgh, Scotland. The theme of our event was “Systems Thinking: Unlocking it’s potential to improve children’s outcomes”. Despite the blustery weather brought over by Storm Ali, and many forms of public transport being cancelled or stalled, we had great attendance from people all over the UK. We’d like to thank everyone who was able to battle through the storm! If you weren’t able to make it, fear not, we are excited to share with you the run-down from the day, including lecture materials and social media content. We would like to extend our thanks once again to Save the Children for co-sponsoring the lecture, and to the UK Chapter of the System Dynamics Society for sponsoring our drinks reception afterwards, which was a great opportunity to continue the discussion. It was with their generous contributions that the lecture was such a success.     We were delighte

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Data-driven co-production: Challenging our preconceptions

With Crisis Skylight Oxford, Maria Portugal and Ben Hartridge are designing new information and publicity materials to support outreach work in food banks, which the Skylight is pursuing as part of the Hothouses for Innovation initiative. It’s just a small part of our overall work but provides a neat example of our approach. In this blog, Ben reflects on the importance to the Lab’s design work of listening to both data and users’ voices.   Data There is a moment of silence in the room as those present digest what I’ve just said. The silence is broken. “I wasn’t expecting that.” I’ve just shown a group of staff at Crisis, a national homelessness charity, a chart showing the demographics of people who used food banks in 2016-17. Before I pulled up the graph, I asked the staff which group of people were most commonly using food bank services. The group pretty much agreed. It must be single women with dependent children. When I show the chart, how

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Doing co-production (well): it’s not rocket science, it’s harder than that – and we need to talk about it.

  When I’ve asked folk what good co-production involves, I’ve received variations of the following responses: ‘It’s just principles of good youth engagement’, ‘It’s not rocket science’ or ‘There’s a toolkit for that’. These responses do a disservice to good co-production. It requires skills and experience to do well – and we undervalue this when we treat it as easy, or obvious. And when we undervalue these skills, or the importance of a robust process, the people who lose out are the users and practitioners who give their time, energy, and honesty.   Why is co-production important in service design? At the Dartington Service Design Lab, we see good co-production – alongside high-quality evidence and an understanding of the wider system - as vital in designing services for children, young people and families that are needed, wanted and likely to make a difference. To unpack that a bit more:   Needed: Are there data or insig

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Be flexible: Lessons from FNP ADAPT

Finlay Green, researcher at the Dartington Service Design Lab, reflects on lessons learned from Rapid-Cycle Testing with FNP ADAPT, and the key to success.   In monsoon conditions in the last week of May, academics, policymakers, and practitioners came together to explore 'Rapid-Cycle Adaptation and Testing (RCAT) at scale in complex service delivery settings'. The prism through which we viewed this was the first stage of the Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) ADAPT programme.  We’ve been working with the FNP National Unit to adapt and test their home-visiting programme for new mothers – this seminar was sharing what we’re learning so far. The speakers and panellists, made up of those from FNP, the Lab and beyond, left the attendees with one over-riding message: whether you're a practitioner delivering frontline services, a researcher evaluating those services or a public health commissioner deciding how to spend your money - be flexible.   Be flexible in cl

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Running a marathon as a sprint: service design accelerated

Ben Hartridge, researcher at the Dartington Service Design Lab, reflects on an improbable hour that distils the essence of a Lab Service Design Sprint. Ann, Mike and Simon, staff from the charity Crisis, stand squinting at the eighty post-it notes that cover the wall. We’re gathered in a conference room in central Glasgow and outside it’s one of those perfectly bright and crisp late winter’s days. In a little over an hour’s time, the eighty notes will have been whittled down to four. Except it’s hard to believe that’s possible right now.     It’s Friday, the pivotal fifth day of a seven-day Service Design Sprint that a small team from the Dartington Service Design Lab (the Lab) – Kate Tobin, Maria Portugal and myself – are running for Crisis, the national homelessness charity. A Design Sprint is a method popularised by Google Ventures – Google’s investment arm – for making rapid progress on the knottiest challenges faced by the start

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Of Mad Surgeons and Moonwalkers: Reflections on the Centre on the Developing Child’s Frontiers of Innovation Workshop

  It’s Day 1 of the 3-day Science-based Frontiers of Innovation Workshop at the Harvard Centre on the Developing Child. The Service Design Lab is here with our partners from the Family Nurse Partnership National Unit to learn about innovative approaches to rapid cycle testing and adaptation.     After a stirring welcome, we hear the famed tale of James Lind’s scurvy trial. Lind was an 18thcentury Scottish naval surgeon who allegedly divided 12 scurvy-afflicted sailors aboard the HMS Salisbury into 6 groups of 2. He offered each dyad the same diet plus either of the following unpleasant supplements: a quart of cider; several drops of sulphuric acid; a few spoonsful of vinegar; half a pint of sea water; 2 oranges and a lemon; or a spicy paste and barley water. According to Lind’s own accounts, only the group that received cider and the group that received the citrus fruits showed improvement, with the latter recovering fully within a week. Lind

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Beyond the buzz: what is a place-based initiative?

  Public and private funders have been building, and backing, place-based approaches for the last ten years. But while grant-makers and grantees are busily buzzing the term to each other in tenders, bids, roundtables and meetings, there’s little consensus on what, precisely, they mean. The discourse on place-based approaches is in need of a vital dose of clarity. I recently delved into the literature to see if I could find any.   Pretty quickly, I decided to simplify matters and focus on answering just two questions. First of all, what does ‘place-based approach’ actually mean? Second, what different kinds of place-based approach are there?   Place-based approaches cover a multitude of virtues A place-based approach is a strategic approach to spending money and other resource in pursuit of a goal. It provides a framework for planning, organising, managing and delivering different activities to realise a specified set of objectives. So we can as

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Looking to share charity back-office functions? We can help!

  New Philanthropy Capital tonight launch a new report into models of collaborative modelling and mergers between charities. They argue that models of charities collaborating and merging some or all of their functions can offer significant potential, not only to create efficiencies and save costs, but more importantly, to free charities up to focus on what really matters to them and those they serve.   We at the Dartington Service Design Lab agree, and think it makes pragmatic and economic sense for small to medium- sized charities to share ‘back-office’ administrative functions.   In May 2016, initially as a short-term trial, our Devon-based operations team took over the immediate support needs of the charity ‘Success for All’ based in York. The partnership went from strength to strength and has continued on a formal basis since then. In the near future Success for All, now based in Peterborough, are going through a period of rapid growth, scaling

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Rapid Cycle Testing – Inspiration from the US

  So far so good Last month, I met with the COO of a US organisation that’s had two Randomised Controlled Trials, both of which showed impact on one of their outcomes – reducing reoffending amongst men recently released from prison. Not only that, but this organisation has highly developed performance management systems, with frontline staff tracking data on individual clients in real-time. All this has helped this organisation expand significantly beyond its traditional New York base.   But not good enough But the COO was far from content. The agenda for the organisation is clear to him: why aren’t they seeing (enough) impact on their other outcome – stable employment – to show up as impact in their trials? Even more importantly: how can they change their programme to change this? He doesn’t think that the answers will come from another large Randomised Controlled Trial (let’s call this RCT1), or even from their diligent performance management. I

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Service

Design

We take a scientific approach, coupled with a deep respect for the needs and wants of the people who use and deliver services.

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System

Reform

We help to change public systems so that they work more effectively for the people using them and more efficiently for the people running them.

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Information

Design

We present information in an engaging and accessible way. We do this to effectively inform the decisions that service leaders, managers and practitioners make.

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