Total Place Summit Day 2
Read about Day 1 of the Summit here.
About the day
Manchester City Region stand courtesy of Nuala O'Rourke
After an invigorating first day at the Total Place Summit, participants were keen to get stuck in on Day 2. They started with coffee and a look round the ‘marketplace’ of stands from places while being addressed by a variety of speakers at the speaker’s corner stand. Once everyone was sufficiently warmed up, they moved back into the main room to hear Lord Bichard being interviewed by our excellent compere, Karen Ellis. You can see excerpts from the interview in the film from the day.
Later in the day, the participants worked together to work out a way forward for the work that was begun under Total Place. Using the questions generated in discusssions on the first day, they mapped out a long list of ‘experiments’ that could be put in place to build on the work of of pilots and parallel places.
Nearly 100 suggestions were generated, and these are currently being pulled together so that they can be taken forward.
Food for thought from Worcestershire
Roger Britton considers accountability. Courtesy of Nuala O'Rourke
We were fortunate to be joined throughout the Summit by a group of young people from Worcestershire. They shared their stories of being Not in Education, Employment or Training with the group. At the closing session, they posed some challenging questions, which deserve a wider audience:
- We felt privileged to have attended an event like this and would like to thank you all for coming.
- Will we get other opportunities like this?
- Although we felt that most of the people present listened to us and were genuinely interested, we still felt that some didn’t take us seriously. Why is this and how can this situation be changed?
- We found that there was a lot of jargon used.
- How can you help us to promote our mental health project?
- Don’t make assumptions about us and what we want. Consult us. Give us feedback on what you’re doing.
- Don’t assume that we don’t want to talk to you. We want to listen and give our input.
- Don’t underestimate young people, we can handle and understand more than you think.
- It takes a lot for us to approach you, please engage with us when we do.
- We’ve been brave to come and put everything on the line, will you be brave and put your cards on the table and take what we’ve said back to use it?
- We would like to have one-to-one conversations as well as group conversations. Try different methods of engaging.
- Get out there and meet young people and ask their opinions.
- If a service is making changes for young people why shouldn’t young people be involved?
- Overall. We’ve really enjoyed this event and would love to come back to help and see if we’ve made a difference.
This is a great list of questions and would be a useful reference point for anyone who’s working in public services. If you can’t come up with an answer to one of these questions, maybe it would be useful to take some time and reflect on your own approach to young people – or the elderly, or single mothers, or immigrants, or even your co-workers!
We were really pleased that the group could come and take part in the event. They’ve been a very busy group – check back soon for more details of what they’ve been up to and what you can expect to hear from them next.
What next for Total Place?
This is a question we’re asked, ooh, roughly 37 times a day here at Total Place HQ. Thankfully, we had the combined force of the best and brightest at the Summit working on experiments that could be run locally or between areas and Whitehall to test a change idea across a number of themes. We’ve shared a selection of ideas below, and you can download the full list as a Word document.
Working with communities
- Community simulations to seek out innovative ‘self managed’ alternatives to big government / service delivery models – state stepping back
- Councillors as relationship brokers – enable and connect communities. Bring them in early and keep them informed
- Invest in local leaders – teachers as community leaders; tenants’ group leaders given a role in service design; give school governors budgets; appoint community governors
- Young people and community service… begins before 16, much earlier in schools… what could children help with?
Roles and groupings
- Local “Assembly” with authority from Key Partners – Commissioning outcomes over specified time scale on narrow slice of activity / outcome – build incremental steps from this.
- A ‘mayor’ for place – need to be champion of place. 10 referendums in different locations.
- A leadership academy across and to the place. Develop communities of leaders across sectors. Focus on joint conversations between politicians and officers.
- Tool kit for working with trade unions, involve them (workforce issues, single public workforce) Shared ‘natural wastage’ across public sector (Newcastle / Manchester)
Funding flows
- Use parish, district, county councils to test pooling / raising funding for localities. Village hall scrutiny!
- Experiment in place-based budgeting – single place budget, perhaps administered by city mayor.
- Facilitate an invest to save model. Explicit ‘Buying prevention’ from central to local partners using a risk/reward approach. Associated with de-ringfencing funds (scalable). Tightly defined to securing outcomes for people.
- Incentivise ‘public sector entrepreneurs’ – significant X% of budgets allocated to ‘Total Place’ work in areas; national incentive system
Delivering complex outcomes
- Develop a ‘customer journey’ from locality perspective e.g. in health, criminal justice to show how things work or don’t work – with regards to relationship with Whitehall. Include a calculation of the current ‘cost of failure’.
- Senior people from MOJ, DWP, DfE etc to get together with localities to do collaborative inquiry to understand how systemic change happens, possibly also joining up around use of behavioural economics
- Turn libraries into service hubs
- Coventry, Solihull and Warwickshire – optimal care model – take through to implementation. Who invests – who benefits, ‘industrialise the learning’.
The day in pictures
Graphic record of Summit
Throughout both days of the event, we had a graphic artist working with us to record the conversations and themes of the two days and create a piece of artwork that would reflect this and prompt new observations from the group. In the end, there was so much conversation that we ended up with two enormous murals. On the left you can see Nick explaining the work. You can also see higher resolution images for The Adventure of Total Place and What Next taken by Nuala O’Rourke. Our thanks to Nick Payne for his excellent work.
Category: event
