Practical insights from pioneering places
The need for reform in public services has never been stronger or more urgent. Since taking office the government has committed to three core reform principles and launched several major programmes to bring them into practice: integrating services around people’s lives, prioritising prevention over crisis response, and devolving power to local areas in partnership with communities and civil society.
From Local Government Reorganisation to Test, Learn and Grow; we are being presented with an unmissable opportunity to radically re-shape the way that services are delivered. Places that have embedded Human Learning Systems (HLS) approaches to public service can provide rich learning for how to deliver against this potential.
This means change doesn’t have to be from a standing start. A quietly radical shift in public service purpose and practice has been happening across the UK over a number of years. Human Learning Systems (HLS) approaches offer ways to make public services more responsive to individual needs, enable improvement through continuous learning and adaptation, and foster system leadership.
As HLS practice has matured, whole-place approaches have started to come to the fore. At Collaborate, we see this as an exciting frontier for public service reform – shifting from pockets of innovation, to embedding HLS as a foundation for wide-scale, long-term systems change that helps people and places flourish.
At an event earlier this year, we invited four place-shapers to explore how we can take an intentional place-based approach to HLS and what roles different system actors can play. We heard from practitioners working at very different levels – from the hyperlocal to the regional – about how they’re bringing HLS to life in their places.
Key takeaways
- A recognition that power needs to be shared, not hoarded, and a belief that decision-making should sit closer to the people it affects.
- A commitment to relationships over transactions, with an emphasis on bridging, convening and translating.
- A shared sense that learning is ongoing—not something to be done at the end of a project.
- An acknowledgement that we are the system – and change needs to start with us.
Download the full report below to read more about what our speakers shared and to understand how to implement what we heard:
Email [email protected] to find out more about how our placed-based programmes and practice could support your work.