Thread by @DartingtonSDL

Our #IntegratedApproach🪢 paper is out now!
We’re blending learning from the ‘What Works’, ‘Co-Production’ & ‘Complexity’ approaches to improve outcomes for children and families. Why now? How can it help? View the paper or follow the thread below: bit.ly/dartington-int…

Often these 3 approaches are used exclusively which can limit evidence generation and use for decision-making. Further to this, it can risk:
🔃 reinforcing discrimination
👀 overlooking existing evidence and
🤏 limiting flexibility and benefits from other approaches

In the last ten years we've played a part in shaping the 'What Works' approach in the UK. That seeks to find out ‘what works’ in improving outcomes for children and young people. Whilst it has many benefits, there are some downsides.

We can mitigate these by integrating techniques from the ‘Co-production’ approach. This pushes for communities, practitioners, and families to be involved in designing and evaluating services. But it's not without challenges either.

Finally, the complexity-informed approach takes us beyond narrow questions of ‘what works’ & ‘needs and wants’ of people, considering the wider context of families and services. By integrating these approaches, we believe evidence can be more robust – but there are still limits:

Changing the system around #evidence requires a change in mindset to embrace new questions, insight-gathering methods and an appetite to act on learning. It applies to national & local commissioners, policymakers, funders, delivery orgs, What Works Centres, evaluators & academics

We want people to read this paper & think about the role that they and their organisation could play in this new #IntegratedApproach. Consider which of the 3 approaches described is most aligned to your work, and which elements of the others you might integrate, and how.

A special thanks to @barnardos, @TheEIFoundation, @childrensociety, @ImpetusPEF, @YouthEndowFund, @TNLComFund, @CEI_org, @EducEndowFoundn, @nick_axford, @vashtilou, @YF_Foundation, @savechildrenuk & @researchIP for their contributions and support in publishing this paper 💜

Please do share with colleagues you think may be interested in using the #IntegratedApproach🪢 in their work, and let us know your thoughts on our paper below👇👇👇
bit.ly/dartington-int…