Incubator grows innovative ideas
Carol Homden, chief executive, Coram
Tuesday, September 28, 2021
New Coram-led project has seen children’s services and businesses identify new ways to tackle problems.
Financial pressures mean that children’s services are being asked to deliver more with less. They want to adapt existing and test new approaches to meet this growing need, but often lack the capacity to pioneer innovative practice and share it across the sector.
It was this finding from our survey and the need to galvanise innovation in the sector that prompted the launch of the Coram Innovation Incubator (CII) earlier this year, bringing together leaders from nine founding local authorities with private sector experts to develop the kind of radical innovations to practice that can have the greatest impact for children and young people.
The CII aims to help build capacity to rise to the challenges faced by children and young people and the services that seek to support them. It addresses ways to encourage entrepreneurship, reduce the risk of innovation, and share learning in action.
Six months on, the CII’s collaborative approach is showing promising early signs. Two early innovations outlined here look to use the existing capacity of technology to improve decision-making, reach and results, with the new CII Innovation Collective identifying a thirst for development addressing adolescent mental health, wellbeing and youth safety.
1. Knowledge mining
Social workers need to map the relationships of the children they work with and keep a handle on those involved in a child’s life to track possible risks. In current practice, they might do this by creating a genogram, an ecomap or a contextual safeguarding map. Such work can be laborious and time consuming, and one CII authority highlighted this as a key area to improve practice.
Microsoft suggested that new, cutting-edge “knowledge mining” technology could help automate this process, freeing up significant resources. Knowledge mining is an artificial intelligence-based tool, which processes complex information and reproduces it in an intelligible, searchable format, enabling users to quickly see links, trends and insights. If a social worker wanted to know about a child’s family, this technology could scan the child’s entire record and generate a clear, interactive family web, which would update over time.
Pivoting this model to children’s services could be truly game-changing as services seek to mitigate ever-increasing safeguarding risks. This project is at an initial stage as we explore how children’s services might prepare to embed such a radical technology into daily practice.
2. Digital outreach tool
We are pioneering a digital outreach tool (DOT), a phone app to help services support vulnerable young people at risk of exploitation and divert them away from a negative path.
By downloading the DOT onto their phone, adolescents will be able to receive immediate, accessible resources and support on a range of issues related to school, peer pressure, wellbeing and safety. For example, the DOT could summarise the signs of criminal exploitation in a simple and accessible way, provide guidance on what to do, and signpost to services.
The DOT model also proposes to feature a new type of rewards programme so that, if a young person spends time using the app, they will regularly receive a voucher for a high-street store or an online service, to encourage engagement.
Young people nominated by children’s services in Hertfordshire, Newham and Southend have informed the proposition and we are working with PA Consulting to design a prototype app to be trialled next year. This will build on positive steps that services have made in co-ordinating the early help offer for young people at risk and to extend its reach to an earlier point.
Next steps
The range of innovation we have uncovered in a relatively short time shows the motivation across children’s services to improve practice for young people when given the opportunity to do so.
The CII Innovation Collective – a digest of innovations across the country – is starting to harness our collective expertise and enthusiasm to ensure we can liberate and inspire the new as well as preserving what works across the sector.
It shows that, with demand for children’s mental health services soaring, attention is turning to how we can innovate to find solutions as the nation tackles this specific crisis for young people.
We want colleagues in children’s services to tell us what they are doing and potentially join us so we can collectively envisage a more positive future for our children and young people.
HOW THE ‘INCUBATOR’ WORKS
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Three innovation labs per annum, each focusing on a specific area of challenge identified as a priority by CII partners, with ideas tested by the collective before being taken forward.
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Regular webinars featuring inspiring leaders and examples which stimulate ambition.
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Learning sets which allow partners to hear from a range of experts in the field and beyond.
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Annual survey enabling children’s services practitioners to test and report on innovation.
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Innovation Collective compiling and reporting on projects and approaches being trialled.
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A business partner assists partners to catalyse, design and implement innovation locally.
More from https://coram-i.org.uk/coram-innovation-incubator/