Co-production and Partnerships | John Lyons Charity Annual Report

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A New Perspective: Call to Action

Honest discourse is essential to ensure mutual understanding

Access and build on knowledge and expertise of all stakeholders including children and young people, and families with lived experience and other organisations
Share effective practices, information, and knowledge, to achieve shared understanding and meaningful outcomes within the project team and to the wider sector
Seek out relevant professionals to support and upskill the team as and where necessary remembering that training should be ongoing and long-term
Signpost stakeholders and others to where support is available for all stages of project development
Ensure reflective practices, with appropriate, meaningful, and proportionate evaluation processes supported by the insight of those who know e.g. schools, participants and families
Be advocates and promote inclusion and inclusive practices

Co-production

Co-production describes the approach to the development of a project that involves the participants who will participate in that project. When embedded correctly, co-production of inclusive activity is a collaborative approach where children and young people, alongside their parents, carers, and service providers, are actively involved as equal partners in the creation of a service to ensure that activities are not only responsive but also reflective of the needs and values of those participating. To ensure effective co-production organisations should consider:

Supporting children, young people, and their families to communicate their views in their preferred way, involving them in decisions regardless of their access needs or communication style.
Creating multiple opportunities for children, young people, and their families to engage in the planning, designing, and evaluation of activities.
Ensuring that those involved are provided with timely feedback and updates to communicate the outcomes of their participation.
Communicating with participants on an ongoing basis so that children, young people, and their families can continue to contribute to the development of services.

“There is a growing understanding of the principles of co- production to increase impact across both schools and arts organisations so that the impact is significantly increased. There is also a growing tendency to develop long term view partnerships that lead to cultural shifts within organisations and the ability to try, to a be more ambitious within partnerships and consider long term change and to include parents and families within programming for a more strategic and joined up approach to partnership working across the space.”
Westminster Special Schools

Case Study: West London Inclusive Arts Festival

In 2016, John Lyon’s Charity awarded a Small Grant to College Park School of £5,000 to run an inclusive arts festival across College Park and QEII schools. Due to the initial success of this first grant in engaging D/deaf, disabled and neurodiverse young people, John Lyon’s Charity has since awarded three further grants under the Main Grants Fund to extend this partnership, which now works with six special schools and six cultural partners.

The Festival embeds inclusion centrally within its structure and uses co-production to inform decisions, approaches and delivery. This includes multiple access points for children and young people to engage in co-production and ongoing Family Steering Groups to shape programming, whilst also building relationships between families, schools and cultural providers.

This is the epitome of what ‘Partnership’ stands for. This particular project has evidenced that long-term, sustained relationships develop the understanding needed to ensure D/deaf, disabled and neurodiverse young people are included in the wider cultural community.

The Royal Albert Hall is one of the Festival’s cultural partners and it has demonstrated its commitment to inclusion by financially supporting various aspects of the partnership, such as parents events, where they hosted a range of cultural partners to meet families so that they could get to know each other and learn about activities that they could access at weekends/holidays or enter into relationships to co-produce projects.

“We have excellent relationships with Westminster Special Schools due to a ‘can do’ attitude and a commitment to pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved together. The relationship is also a mutual one where skills and resources are equally shared and whereby our respective organisations learn from the other – it’s not a case of something being done to the other but much more a co-production approach to working. The main challenge we’ve encountered is principally about timings – it takes time for groups to get to the Hall and also back in time for the end of the school day; offering our engagement opportunities to a large number of students throughout the course of one day is simply not realistic.”
Royal Albert Hall

Benefits and Challenges

In order for D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent children and young people to engage meaningfully in co-production, they must be able to understand what is being produced and, most importantly, what they are being asked to do. Participation in co-production works best when the engagement is planned with multiple ways to engage, so that the activities are appropriate for all children and young people to take part in. As such, it is also important to include children and young people with different styles of communication, including those that do not communicate verbally, which will often require organisations to think creatively using methods such as signing, widgets or movement.

Benefits of Co-production

Each individual can bring new ideas, skills and expertise, that an organisation may not hold internally
By involving children, young people and families from the outset, delivery is more likely to meet their needs
Co-production is an engaging process to encourage participation in projects, once in delivery stages

Challenges to Co-production:

Not all children and young people communicate in the same way
Co-production takes time and resource to embed, which leads to an increased cost
Some participants and parents may be more active in engaging in planning activities, so may have an amplified voice compare to their peers

Co-production can easily become tokenistic when ideas and expertise are not later incorporated.

Considerations

All those involved in project delivery should be included in the planning stages.

Co-production can increase the feeling of community within project delivery.

Co-production should consider multiple entry points for young people to contribute, so all young people can contribute, regardless of learning or access need.

Families of D/deaf, disabled and neurodiverse young people should also be involved in project design, they can also act as a sounding board to inform best practice.

Make sure any required communication tools are available for children with a learning
disability or communication need to use.

Contact

Savoy Strand, 105 Strand, London, WC2R 0AA
T: 020 7259 1700