Your Voice, Your Way: Co-design of a Feedback Tool in Children’s Social Care
Service design
Renfrewshire Children’s Social Care and Snook
We are working in partnership with Renfrewshire Children’s Social Care and Snook to transform the way young people’s experiences are heard and acted upon within the care system. Through multiple conversations with young people, parents, carers and frontline practitioners we have understood that young people want to be meaningfully involved in decisions that affect them. In response we have developed a ‘Meaningful Conversations Quality Assurance Framework’ to guide Social Work staff in consistently ensuring young people are active participants in decisions about their lives. To support ongoing reflection, learning and development we have also created a suite of e-learning modules and visual posters and tools, for practitioners to access over time.
The need
Social Work services always work for the best interest of the children and young people they support. However, with so many people in each young person’s life and so many important life decisions happening, it can be hard to ensure that young people’s voices are truly heard and acted upon. Young people shared with us that they don’t want new tools or feedback forms, but simply to have more meaningful conversations with those who support them. These approaches will be vital for Local Authorities in Scotland implementing the Independent Care Review’s ‘Promise’, which stipulates young people’s views must form a pivotal part of care plans.
Our response
In response, we have engaged with over forty young people, thirty practitioners and multiple parents, carers and subject experts to co-create the ‘Meaningful Conversations Framework’, supporting training and tools. Over three phases, we undertook deep research into current communication in Renfrewshire Children’s Social Care, looking at technical options and the feasibility of implementing new approaches. We prioritised these insights with young people and Social Work managers, before using them to develop the first ‘Meaningful Conversations Framework’ which we refined with a co-design group of Social Work staff, who also supported us in creating the online training, a suite of physical tools and posters. The aim is for these resources to support consistent high quality conversations with young people across care settings, and enable staff to continuously reflect upon and adapt their practice based on what young people tell them is important. We’d love to share the findings of this work with anyone else who is interested in implementing meaningful conversations into service delivery, get in touch to find out more.
This partners in this project are Renfrewshire Council and We Are Snook Design Agency.
This project is funded by the Life Changes Trust.
Our work started in 2019 and concluded in 2021.
For more information, contact: