Co-production with our communities is crucial to our success.  To highlight our commitment to Co-production our annual conference in 2019 was titled ‘Who’s the Expert?’   We wanted to show and emphasise the importance of [1]lived experience and that everyone is an expert in their own life and community. In order to get commitment from partners, and those attending it was crucial that we maximised as much as possible the learning and development impact that could be made on the day. We also wanted to ensure that we embedded the principles of A Better Start in all of the content, and that naturally meant that we would focus on innovation, service design and co-production in all of the preparation work that we did.

One of the innovative elements that we aimed to embed in the (non or un!) conference programme was to create an environment of facilitated conversation, where families could share learning as part of the programme. Our previous experience in service development identified that providing an on-site creche[2] would also maximise engagement and the opportunity for parents and parent champions to attend on the day. In order to extend our messaging further we used innovative evaluation methods (e.g. live social wall, displaying a live feed of the tweets posted under our hashtag) and had the support from some amazing young people to act as rapporteurs for the day. It was great to see that #whostheexpert2019 was tweeted 385 times in a day showing the ‘buzz’ that was being created in terms of the content. This hashtag was also trending locally too!

Parent Champions and our delivery partner Southend Association of Voluntary Services were key in co-designing our overall aims for the day which were 1. shared learning and collaboration, 2. experience, networking and shaping, 3. co-design, co-production, and lived experience, 4. innovation and research in the Early Years, and 5. ‘test and learn and improving through delivery’. It was agreed that the content would include a mix of key-note speeches (many thanks to Southend Borough Council, University of Essex, Service Design Lab, and Snook for making these happen), as well as outcome-based family learning, and practice-based sessions which encouraged open conversation [3]about ‘what works’ and ‘what doesn’t’.

We asked what those due to attend would most like to share and learn on the day, and this would also be used to inform how we could further work in partnership with those who co-design and deliver our services. After the event we could see that the biggest self-reported increases in knowledge were ‘the use of lived experience’ (+ 30.83%) and The ABSS Programme (+ 14.67%). This is useful for looking at the strategic direction of ABSS, its case for change and in developing policy and practice as a partnership. Building further on this we will be looking to do further impact assessment in terms of the conference including following up as to how, and the extent to which messages have been sustained in terms of ‘takeaways’, as well as embedding into practice.

If you would like more information about our conference and how we are taking forward the learning from this you can visit our knowledge exchange lab on our website or alternatively you can contact rachel.wood@eyalliance.org.uk

We look forward to hearing from you.

Rachel A.Wood is Knowledge, Research and Evaluation Lead at A Better Start Southend and Editor of the ABSS Research Bulletin

[1] Glasby, J., Beresford, P. (2006) Who knows best? Evidence-based practice and the service user contribution. Critical Social Policy 26(1): 268–284, Byrne, L. Happell, B. and Reid-Searl, K. (2015), Lived experience practitioners and the medical model: worlds colliding? Journal of Mental Health, 25 (3), pp 217-223

[2] Goodall, J. and Vorhaus, J. (2010), Review of Best Practice in Parental Engagement, DfE

[3] Davis, MM. Nagukaldi, Z. Darby-Lipman, P. and Haught, J. (2018), First International Conference on Practice Facilitation: A Success!, Annals of Family Medicine, 16 (3), 274-275