Guide to Co-Production

Overview

This page explains what Co-production is, why we should all aim to do it and how we can make it happen.

It is Trafford guidance for all agencies and partners wherever possible including managers and front line practitioners, providers of services and most importantly those people using our services – children, young people and their families.

In this guide we refer to service users as residents, those in the community with knowledge and experience. This refers to adults, families, children, young people, parents and carers from all backgrounds across Trafford.

What is Co-production?

In Trafford we define Co-production as… “making something happen together”.

This means professionals and residents work together equally to produce something, redressing the balance where previously professionals have led with some, limited or no input from residents or service users.

Co-production allows people to feel empowered to contribute to the design of a service and to use their skills and expertise within the process, enabling them to have much more of a say and input into the services they use.

Co-production is a process that should be adopted from the earliest moment of a project beginning and through each subsequent stage – design, delivery and review.

What are the benefits of Co-production?

By Co-producing, professionals can work alongside residents benefitting from their knowledge and experience in order to develop a new service or make improvements to an existing one. Residents are known as “experts by experience”.

By involving everyone from the outset we are more likely to get things right, using resources in a way that best helps people.

Ladder of Co-production

Co-production is a new way of working, a culture change that is more respectful to everyone involved. To fully understand Co-production and how to use it, we need to look at it in relation to the Ladder of Co-production.

The Ladder of Co-production recognises various steps of participation on the way to achieving Co-production. Sometimes, due to the inflexibility of official processes, time or budget restraints Co-production may not always be achievable at each stage of a process. In these cases other forms of positive participation should be recognised and considered until Co-production becomes more realistic, meaningful and achievable.

What is important is that the way of working and the development and creation of services is ‘done with people’ and not ‘done to people’ to ensure the best outcomes are achieved.

In Trafford, we have created our own simplified version of this ladder to better understand the different levels of participation.

Co-production principles

Co-production is built upon a set of principles that when followed can lead to a reduction in the use of acute or specialist services, help to sustain and promote well-being and help contribute to an improvement in quality of life.

The principles Trafford follows for Co-production are:

1. Diversity – everyone’s included

Co-production should be as inclusive and diverse as possible. More effort is needed to hear from groups that perhaps don’t usually speak up, or find it more difficult to get involved. We also need to make sure that there are opportunities for many people with lived experiences to get involved in service development.

2. Equality – everyone has assets

Probably the most important principle is that we have to start from a position where everyone is an equal partner – no one group or person is more important than another.

We need to create a culture where we listen to everyone, enabling children, young people, families and adults to influence decisions on how services are developed, delivered and accessed by all.

We all need to recognise what each individual brings to the group and how it can best be used whether it is lived experience, knowledge and/or resources.

3. Accessibility – no barriers for anyone

We all need to think about how accessible we make Co-production, and what else we should be doing to make it more accessible.

We need to consider physical access, providing accessible information, using the right language and terminology, understanding confidentiality and information sharing and importantly making sure everyone understands what Co-production means and allowing the time for Co-production to develop.

4. Reciprocity – everyone benefits

If people are taking the time to Co-produce, then everyone has to get something back for putting something in. Ideally this should be in the form of feeling that they have made a difference, and further down the line, they need to see the impact that their contribution has made.

Our shared commitment

To make Co-production a part of the way in which we shape services in Trafford, all partners need to make a shared commitment to working together:

As the people who access and develop services in Trafford, we are committed to working together to ensure that the principles of effective Co-production underpin the shaping and improvement of our services.

We recognise that true Co-production is taking place when all parties are able to agree with the statements in the checklist.

Co-production – Making it real

Co-production is not a one-off activity and as such is difficult to measure. Co-production should become embedded in all we do and lead to a system change. Therefore instead of measuring Co-production, we should learn from it through ongoing and regular reviews of both the outcomes and the process of Co-production itself.

Trafford have a monitoring template for capturing this learning.

Depending on partners involved, measuring and reviewing Co-production may take different formats. Public sector organisations and partner agencies may require a more formal approach which is built into organisational evaluation processes.

However it is important that residents are also given opportunities to feedback.

One way to measure how effective the outcomes and the process of Co-production have been is to use the Co-production checklist which is based on a series of ‘I statements’. If all partners can agree on all, or the majority of the points, it can be assumed that Co-production has been achieved.

Top Tip
The Co-production checklist can also be used at the start of co-production to act as a guide

If you would like a copy of the Trafford SEND Guide to Co-production for your Co-production meetings you can find it here.