Are you part of cleaning, catering, or housekeeping staff in care homes and would you like to share your experiences? Or are you a care home manager or in charge of Human Resources in a care home and have experiences with the ancillary workforce? Please contact Olivia by email olivia.luijnenburg@kcl.ac.uk or telephone 07927 512916. To thank you for your time, we will send you a £20 voucher.

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LARIA North East Autumn 2019 Networking Event

Organised by LARIA (Local Area Research and Information Association) and free to attend, this is your chance to get together with other local area researchers in the North East and learn about new research techniques.
A more informal session than previously, we will have a presentation on plans for the Census 2021 by Louise Reeve (Assistant Census Liaison Manager for Newcastle City Council), and the rest of the time will be set aside for networking and general discussion.
If you have any queries, contact Louise Reeve, LARIA North East Co-ordinator, and I’ll be happy to answer them: louise.reeve@newcastle.gov.uk.

Book your place here: LARIA North East Networking 1 December 2020

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The profiles are available here; the profiles use the same data as in an England-wide briefing, see here. 

If you would like to be updated on future resources please email Chris Lloyd on c.lloyd@qub.ac.uk. 

Chris would also appreciate feedback on the profiles – if they are useful it would be very helpful to have a brief note on how they have been used. The PopChange project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

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Congratulations go to:

• Lancashire County Council for winning ‘Best use of community safety or policing research’ with ‘Understanding of complex anti-social behaviour cases including cases presented at partner riot assessment conference (ASBRAC)’;
• Manchester City Council for winning ‘Best use of local area research’ with ‘Troubled Families evaluation 2017’.

The awards were presented at the annual LARIA conference in Sheffield.

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New researcher of the year (highly commended) – Haydn Brown, Manchester City Council – Light rail and the Manchester property market – part 1; Light rail and the Manchester property market – part 2; Light rail and the Manchester property market – part 3 

Most engaging presentation of local area research (shortlisted) – Steven Hibbert, Manchester City Council – PSR Outcomes Framework      

Best use of local area research 1 (highly commended) – Gemma Jones, Lancashire County Council – Breaking the boundaries_service planning based on need not construct 

Best use of local area research 2 – (shortlisted) – Tim Robinson, Manchester City Council – Neighbourhood intelligence (confidential)

Best use of social care or health research 1 – (highly commended) – Farhat Abbas, Lancashire County Council – Saving the children – making infant deaths everybody’s business 

Best use of social care or health research 2 – (highly commended) – Charlotte Harris, Revealing Reality/Wirral Council – Barriers of binary thinking_tackling health related worklessness on the Wirral

Best use of social care or health research 3 – (shortlisted) – Leo Wall, Manchester City Council and Manchester CCGs Business Intelligence – Understanding health demands in Manchester

Further information from: l.frost@manchester.gov.uk

The post LARIA North West 15 July 2016 – summary of event appeared first on LARIA - Local Area Research + Intelligence Association.

• A map of how public services feel from a citizen perspective
• A timeline of national attempts to join up public services (1997-2015)
• A short paper on the perennial barriers to joining up and insights on how to tackle them
• A blog summarising the project and key findings

In the next phase of work, they will be conducting several  visits to local areas  to provide practical support and challenge to as they implement new approaches to joining up in employment and skills and health and social care. The Institute for Government will also work with local partners to find effective models for sharing learning, ideas and evidence. For more updates, or to get involved keep an eye on our project page or get in touch with Dr Jo Casebourne, Programme Director.

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The Business and Local Government (BLG) Data Research Centre jointly with the Local Government Association (LGA) invites you to this seminar where we will bring together researcher and local authority decision makers to understand, explore and define the questions for future research to address local problems.

The seminar will introduce the research topics of the Centre around support for vulnerable people, local economic growth and access to infrastructure followed by presentations from local authority decision makers to present their current issues to meet public service needs.

For the full programme and to book your place, please see here.

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By John Heneghan – Head of Policy & Strategy, Kirklees Council.

We’ve started a major transformation programme in Kirklees, with the aim of creating our ‘New Council’…

We want to become a more enabling council … a council which connects ideas, people and resources, so we can support communities to harness and build on their strengths. This shift of focus is about creating trust and synergy. We will be collaborating – locally, regionally, nationally and internationally – to find new solutions.

To support this vision, we’re developing a new approach to policy and strategy. We see reconnecting policy and practice as a key part of our new council ethos.

Our new approach will be more connected, collaborative and citizen-centred. We will generate solutions through experimentation, prototyping and iteration. It’s a much more dynamic and adaptive process than traditional strategy design and implementation.

Here are some of the key stages in our new strategy model and my reflections on the essential role played by research and intelligence…

Problem framing: We begin by problem framing – because trying to solve the wrong problem is, well, a common problem. Many strategies fail to articulate the problem they are trying to solve or to describe what success would look like.

Does our intelligence, insight and analysis suggest there is a need for a solution?

Using insight from customer or citizen engagement is a critical part of problem framing. By understanding the problem through the lens of the service user, customer or citizen we can avoid creating the perfect solution for the wrong problem.

Ideation: Through collaboration and citizen engagement we seek to generate different perspectives on the problem and ideas for possible solutions. Insight, in its broadest sense, is essential for idea generation – we need to seek out perspectives that are different from our own to avoid fitting the problem to our existing expertise.

We must use ideas which flow from customer insight; to bring in fresh perspectives by working collaboratively; and to ensure that our ideas are not just top-down. To do this, we need to use approaches which engage the whole workforce and are highly participative.

We rely on our research, intelligence and analysis to test if the ideas that emerge are credible hypotheses, not random shots in the dark.

Logic model: The logic model or “theory of change” gets us to focus on how we will evaluate potential solutions and how we will measure success. It aims to develop a logical proposition – we believe that if we do x it will lead to y – and a clear relationship between our activities, outputs, outcomes and longer term impact. It challenges us to isolate metrics for all our activities – describing what we will measure and developing a plan for how we will collect this data.

There are three big reasons why measuring impact is important:

• Measuring impact allows us to check and see if we’re on track, and this can inform whether or not we should adjust our plans.
• Having clear goals and ways to measure our progress towards them helps bring stakeholders together around a common purpose. It keeps everyone focused on the end goal, which is very important when working with multiple partners.
• Having data to help tell our story gives us a clear and compelling way to communicate what we’re doing, what we’re going to achieve and what we have achieved so far.

Altogether, this helps us to gain support for the programme both internally and externally.

Hypothesis testing: Traditionally, we write a strategy, consult on it, refine the strategy and then implement it through a delivery plan. We take a different approach now, taking a cue from The Lean Start Up, Eric Ries’s bible for entrepreneurs. Ries recommends seeing business as a real-world experiment and making a hypothesis about what will work – a minimum viable product – to test with real consumers.

We need to acknowledge that all strategies – and, I would argue, most of our projects and programmes – contain assumptions. Too often though, it’s not until we’re well into our delivery that we realise our assumptions were wrong, and the strategy is not having the traction or impact we had planned for. Experimentation and prototyping are key for making our strategies less risky. Using these methods, we can test our core assumptions in a small way early on, experiment to see what works in the real world, then iterate or pivot until we can show success.

Our capacity for research, intelligence and insight is central to this and to all the stages in our new strategy model. It really is the engine of effective strategy implementation and public sector innovation.

(Photo credit: Ray Morris1, Byram Arcade – Huddersfield)

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See more details on the project website 

LARIA NW IER – M Henn

 
Prof Matt Henn (Nottingham Trent University) talks about why young people don’t vote

John Bradley spoke about mis-matches in the ‘dry-run’ of matching Electoral Registration and DWP data and how this related to issues of ethnicity, household tenure and student areas.

LARIA NW IER – J Bradley

John Bradley (Manchester CC) explains the issues of targeting hard to reach communities in Manchester

Charlotte Snelling explained the issues found in the UK Electoral Commission’s research on under-registration and the proposed areas of activity to encourage engagement and maximise registration.

 • Confirmation dry run (looks at match rates and areas where more green/more red matches etc., and also survey results from the electoral services staff going through the process.

• Data matching pilots

• Analysis of under-registered groups and drivers of LA registration rates

 • Under-registered groups

N.B.  Cabinet Office also commissioned some research looking at barriers to registrations amongst URGs and also the transition to IER

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Charlotte Snelling (Cabinet Office) speaks about maximising registration for IER

The challenges facing Manchester City Council were described by Lesley Spencer while Peter Richards detailed how the Council is using communications to promote proposed activities in the IER process.

LARIA NW IER – L Spencer

Lesley Spencer (Manchester CC) describes the IER experience in Manchester

Peter Richards (Manchester CC) reports on how Manchester is using communications in the IER process

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