Introduction
About this guide, and Changing Futures.
There is a long-standing interest in improving support for people who are experiencing multiple disadvantage in the UK. There is now a good understanding of what effective support for people experiencing multiple disadvantage looks like. The challenge is making these ways of working the norm.
Changing people’s longer-term experiences of services – and, related to this, their longer-term outcomes – requires going beyond providing specialist (often time-limited) support. While there is good evidence that intensive case-working helps to achieve outcomes for people experiencing multiple disadvantage, other services must play their part. As the Changing Futures programme found, for people experiencing multiple disadvantage to engage with and benefit from local public services, these services need improved coordination, capabilities and accessibility.
Some systemic obstacles to effective support, such as a lack of affordable housing, are not easy to address. But the day-to-day delivery of programmes like Changing Futures is producing learning on how to tackle more manageable challenges. This guide seeks to share some of this learning.
This guide is for those seeking to lead or contribute to systems change, either within their own organisation or across the local system.
Key audiences include operational and strategic managers in services used by people experiencing multiple disadvantage, service commissioners, policymakers, learning professionals, and elected officials and other senior decision-makers with an interest in tackling multiple disadvantage.
The guide is aimed at people who are relatively new to systems change and/or multiple disadvantage; however, we hope that those with more experience will find it useful to compare their approaches with those of the Changing Futures teams, whose learning is captured here.
This is not a guide to systems change or systems thinking; other guides are available on this topic. Instead, it seeks to share the challenges that Changing Futures areas encountered, and how local programme staff and stakeholders went about tackling these.
The guide is not designed to be read from cover to cover, but rather for readers to ‘dip into’ chapters of interest. Chapters are designed to stand alone, and where material is relevant to several topics, it will appear in more than one chapter. The guide includes links throughout to other relevant chapters.
Each chapter focuses on a particular type of systems change:
1. Securing strategic buy-in and alignment 2. Improving data and insight 3. Supporting trauma-informed working 4. Joining up services and addressing gaps in support 5. Ensuring equity for underserved groups 6. Creating a learning culture
Each chapter includes the following information:
First, each opening section introduces an aspect of local systems, and how making improvements can contribute to better services and outcomes for people experiencing multiple disadvantage.
Things to consider summarises the key advice and learning in each chapter. It lists what’s useful to think about and investigate, rather than do’s and don’ts. Every local area is different, so this guide aims to alert you to issues, not be prescriptive.
What were the barriers? describes the problems and barriers in local systems that Changing Futures areas were seeking to address. We have included this to enable readers to consider if they are encountering similar issues.
What worked well discusses the strategies and actions that people thought helped them to achieve improvements. The focus is on how people went about making change, rather than the models of support that they introduced for people experiencing multiple disadvantage.
Lessons learned shares insights from Changing Futures colleagues about what they would do differently, or the constraints and issues that they understand better than when they started their work.
Getting started includes a tool or activity designed to help readers to better use key learning from the chapter.
Resources and further reading shares both materials produced by local Changing Futures areas and other resources from other recommended by Changing Futures staff. It represents just a small selection of the material that is available to support systems change, and to improve the support for people experiencing multiple disadvantage. These are shared for information only and have not been reviewed as part of the evaluation.
Each chapter includes examples from Changing Futures areas, designed to showcase the experience of programme staff and stakeholders. You will find these examples in the boxes labelled Case studies or Spotlight.
Every local area is different, and local context plays an important role in shaping what people will need to do to achieve change. This includes factors such as geography (the size of the area, how rural or urban it is), administrative organisation (how local authorities and other bodies are configured), and an area’s history of addressing multiple disadvantage (other initiatives that may have left a legacy on which to build). What has worked in one area may not work in another. Case studies include information about the wider context, so that the reader can consider how approaches might fit within their own context and tailor them appropriately.
The Changing Futures programme is a £91.8 million joint initiative from the government and the National Lottery Community Fund. It seeks to test innovative approaches to improving outcomes for people experiencing multiple disadvantage – including homelessness, substance misuse, mental ill health, domestic abuse, and contact with the criminal justice system. The programme is running in fifteen areas across England from 2021 to 2026.
Changing Futures aims to create change at 3 levels:
- Individual level: Stabilised and improved outcomes for local cohorts of adults experiencing multiple disadvantage.
- Service level: Greater integration and collaboration across local services, to provide a person-centred approach and reduce demand on reactive services.
- Systems level: Strong multi-agency partnerships, governance, and better use of data, to inform commissioning and lead to lasting systems change. Learning from evaluation and partnerships between government and local areas to improve cross-government policy.
The evaluation of Changing Futures found that local projects had helped to improve the understanding and adoption of trauma-informed practice in local services, communication and coordination between services, and in some cases, the accessibility of services for people experiencing multiple disadvantage. Changing Futures also contributed to increasing the understanding of and partnership-working on multiple disadvantage at a strategic level. In some cases, there has been greater involvement of people with lived experience in the commissioning of services, and changes in what is commissioned.
At the same time, the progress experienced by local areas has not been uniform, and many of the barriers described in this guide persist. Changing Futures teams were not always able to find effective solutions to the problems they encountered. It is hoped that others will benefit and learn from these experiences, and accelerate progress. Adopting tried and tested methods, where they exist, should allow greater attention to be focused where solutions are still sought.
More information on the progress being made on systems change can be found in the reports of the Changing Futures evaluation.
This guide was developed using the advice and learning of Changing Futures colleagues across England. The focus of the guide and the topics it covers were identified by consulting both local and national Changing Futures staff working on systems change.
The guide draws on evidence collected as part of the national evaluation of the Changing Futures programme, and interviews with staff in different Changing Futures areas about their experiences of carrying out systems change.
Case studies have been selected to showcase the work of as many of the 15 Changing Futures areas as possible. Each area therefore generally only features in one chapter. It is important to acknowledge that many of the approaches described in the case studies were used in other Changing Futures areas, but it was necessary to select just one example.
Quotes featured throughout are from local Changing Futures programme stakeholders; these include programme team members and staff from partner organisations.