The Changing Futures programme is a £91.8 million joint funded initiative between Government and The National Lottery Community Fund, the largest community funder in the UK. The programme funds local organisations working in partnership in 15 local areas across England to better support those who experience multiple disadvantage.
Over the last year, MEAM has brought the local programme leads together for regular discussions about key aspects of the work. In this series of blog posts, we reflect on some of the topics covered, drawing on their insight and input from others in the Changing Futures programme and the wider MEAM Approach network.
In this fifth blog of the “Learning and Reflections” series, we take a closer look at governance and strategy and how Changing Futures are exploring new ways to come together to manage interventions for people experiencing multiple disadvantage.
Any funded intervention in a local area for people experiencing multiple disadvantage will need to have some form of governance and oversight mechanism in place. These will vary from place to place, depending on related local strategies and oversight arrangements. But, are there common threads in approaches to governance and strategy that can be seen across successful local areas? And can we learn from how they are moving past old ways of doing things, and thinking effectively for people experiencing multiple disadvantage?
Why think about strategy and governance?
Some observers may question a strong focus on strategy and governance in the first place – surely it’s all about the frontline work?. But to be able to deliver this work well, local areas know that you need two things: firstly, well-supported, well-funded and well-designed work that responds to local needs and fits with local strategies, agendas and policies; and secondly, the need to be thinking seriously, and across sectors, about the systemic conditions that are causing the problems in the first place. These problems are often caused by poor connections in the spaces where strategy development and governance take place.
So, being able to deliver better interventions for people necessarily means more joined up strategy and more joined up local governance processes to centre multiple disadvantage in the work done by local colleagues in many different sectors.
Current challenges for better strategy development and governance
One overriding challenge for local areas is the way that disjointed and uncoordinated spending within the system drives disjoined and uncoordinated responses to multiple disadvantage. It is particularly difficult to plan and develop strategy for multiple disadvantage in a local area when the national funding environment continues to deliver resources in silos, is often shifting, and lacks an articulated common purpose. Local areas end up having to knit together pots of funding, which takes time and energy and creates a significant reporting burden.
There are also challenges related to data quality on people experiencing multiple disadvantage, meaning that it is difficult to take robustly evidenced decisions on work priorities (we’ll explore this in next week’s blog on data). In addition, there is often the need within traditional strategy development for clear-set “problems” and “answers,” which can stifle experimental and iterative ways of working in systems.
Traditional governance and strategy infrastructure tends to be focused on programme delivery rather than system stewardship, and this limits opportunities for the right kind of input from cross-sector professionals and people who have experience of multiple disadvantage. For example, a traditional local governance board tends to look at programme costs and outcomes, while a systemic governance board is formed of people from across sectors who are willing to question the way that things work and take responsibility for change in their part of the local system. Ensuring systemic governance is a key focus of Changing Futures and MEAM Approach areas
In addition, the processes related to “doing” good multiple disadvantage governance are not always seen as an integral part of a good systemic response to multiple disadvantage, with the temptation to focus on enhancing service delivery over thinking more broadly about why the system is not doing as well as it could.
Areas also reflected on the challenges in getting partnerships to really hold joint responsibility for tackling multiple disadvantage, noting that when the system gets exposed to stress, partnership working can sometimes be more rhetoric than reality and that systems retreat into constituent siloes.
What are local areas experimenting with and what are they doing differently?
Many Changing Futures and MEAM Approach Network areas across England are thinking about how they can respond differently in the space of governance and strategy. Examples include:
- Thinking about how to bring in new voices and properly support people with lived experience and grassroots agencies in strategic and governance spaces.
- Encouraging senior staff across sectors to take a greater interest in multiple disadvantage as an organising principle for work in their specialism and to take on key ownership and leadership roles to make sure work gets done.
- Considering how to properly resource the time and effort spent in “system convening” and thinking more about how to create good systemic governance for multiple disadvantage in which everyone takes a responsibility for change, rather than simply offering traditional oversight and accountability for expenditure.
- Thinking about how governance spaces are used differently, to make them more welcoming, attractive and inclusive of a broader range of voices, cover a broader range of topics and use time more effectively.
- Developing strategy documents in an accessible, down-to-earth way. They are experimenting with video outputs, theatre, illustration and accessible formats
What else might need to happen?
These new approaches to governance and strategy are going some way to developing more effective interventions for people experiencing multiple disadvantage. However, some structural issues remain, that are outside of the control of local systems. This includes uncoordinated silo-based funding cycles and the need to develop more effective partnership working and feedback loops between local systems responding to the needs of people experiencing multiple disadvantage and central government departments.