Commissioning: Participation and co-production

The most important thing in children's services is the child, young person and their family. It's easy to say but can be forgotten among the mountain of regulation, process and recording.

As commissioners, how do we keep the child at the centre of what we do?

Involving children and families in the design and delivery of services is the best way to make sure we are meeting the needs of service users. These are the two key elements in a co-production approach:

• In terms of delivery, ensuring frontline staff work with families in a collaborative way provides both support and challenge, which helps parents and carers to build their resilience, self-worth and independence.
• In terms of service design, co-production can help you understand value from the perspective of children, create services that deliver the experience and outcomes that young people want, and better manage providers through user feedback and measurement of real impact.

The easiest way to do this, is to ask children, young people and families. When my previous authority was redesigning early years services, we met with parents in a children's centre to discuss the technicalities. One said that she had pushed a buggy past the children's centre for three years without knowing what it was. "Why don't you put a sign up saying what it is?" she asked. It highlighted what we needed to change.

Commissioners face a tough choice of how to best engage over different decisions, service configuration and pathways.

When we redesigned mental health services, we worked with our young health ambassador and young people's groups (see box). The big switch was to shift from an acute-focused service to thinking about the thousands of children with unmet need, and how to enable the wider system of young people, parents and teachers to support lower-level emotional wellbeing.

Young people helped us to form the strategy and the young health ambassador sits on the council's board to steer decisions. In addition, young people have created a video that we use for workforce development and go into services to review and improve them.

There is a culture shift, and while we are a long way from being an exemplar, I genuinely believe it to be transformational when we begin to think about our services from a user's rather than professional's perspective. If we can align benefits for users with benefits for providers, and deliver the outcomes that are needed rather than what we think people want, then services will be better and cheaper.

We have also established an apprentice commissioner programme. It sends a strong message to job applicants, service providers and board members that they now have to think from the perspective of a young person.

Finally, it is only right we hear an honest view from a young commissioner. Vikki Versey is the health ambassador who is working on our transformation of mental health services (see below).

YOUNG PERSON'S VIEW VIKKI VERSEY, YOUNG HEALTH AMBASSADOR

"When young people are involved in engagement and co-production, it benefits them greatly. It enables them to be part of the work that is taking place within organisations, and to have a voice in shaping these decisions.

Young people are very honest about what they would like, and can be very articulate regarding processes and decisions they understand. When a young person is correctly engaged or part of true co-production, they tend to feel valued, thus giving better input to the redesigns they are involved in. Young people being around the table can strongly influence the views of commissioners, by enabling them to understand the real issues for young people, and their perspective on services.

Having young people on a panel, helping to design services, or even on a board, is also a very powerful statement that organisations can make; real co-production creates an environment of openness and transparency, respect, and ultimately enables young people to feel important.

True co-production and engagement works best when all partners around the table are able to adjust to the style of working with young people. It can be a very powerful collaboration, where important decisions are made. Quite often, unfortunately, commissioners tend to resort to tokenism as it is an easier way of trying to showcase ‘co-production'. This does not benefit the organisation nor the young people, and it can become fractious."

• Richard Selwyn is a member of the Association of Directors of Children's Services resources and sustainability policy committee @rjselwyn