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Capable Communities - People powering change

The problem

The idea

Reading Borough Council is working with NESTA and the Innovation Unit looking at radical innovation in early years’ services to deliver better outcomes at less cost. We have learned huge amounts from this work, especially the overriding importance of changing how professionals work with families and some of the barriers to creativity and innovation that prevent this from happening. Through this bid we are seeking to use this learning not only to implement our ideas across early years’ services but to move beyond successfully running innovative projects to becoming an innovative, creative council into the future. Central to this is the principle that we need to focus on strengthening the influence and power of individuals, families and communities to find their own solutions; shifting the culture of our institutions and the workforce to build capable communities rather than relatively impenetrable services delivered “to”. Across a range of services, especially in communities with high levels of perceived need, we have invested huge resources and continue to do so. Despite many of these services being of high quality and a number of success stories we have demonstrably failed to impact significantly on levels of overall deprivation, poor outcomes across generations or to have closed the inequality gap .

We need to re-think our ethos, principles and models of delivery from both moral and financial imperatives. We intend to build on the success of our work to date where parents are demonstrating a clear desire and capacity to support each other and their local communities to a far greater extent. We want to scale-up this work across all children’s centres with communities taking the lead and professional roles re-drawn to support and facilitate across a wider range of services. Ultimately to use this process to transform the council.

What we need

Tags

NESTACC

Reading Borough Council