SCIE report reveals that people who draw on social care feel excluded from reform efforts
The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) has published a new report which highlights how people who use social care are encountering systemic or organisational barriers that prevents collaboration from working, and families are feeling left out of fast-paced decision-making.
The report, titled ‘Shaping change together: co-producing innovation in social care’, examines how people receiving social care, carers and families are involved in shaping social care services.
Drawing on the findings from a national survey, it explores how collaboration works in practice, what barriers persist and how innovation can be made to deliver genuine improvement for people’s lives.
The report found that when collaboration works well, it generates fresh thinking and solutions that are trusted, usable and ready to embed in everyday practice. However, while 72 per cent of professionals believe it is currently working well enough to drive meaningful change, only 53 per cent of people who use social care – and just 28 per cent of families – agree;
SCIE will join other sector leaders at the National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC) 2025 this week to share insights from the report. It is calling for innovation to be built on collaboration from the start, helping identify what matters most and ensuring that new ideas are actually used and trusted.
It also wants to see long-term investment in people and partnerships, not just projects or technology with funding for time, infrastructure and skills to make co-production standard practice. Stronger accountability for inclusion is needed, states the SCIE, to ensure that people’s input is visible, acted on and reported back.
As the Government pushes forward with national reform, the SCIE is arguing that innovation cannot be imposed from above and must be built with the insight, experience and leadership of the people who live and work within the system every day.
Kathryn Marsden OBE, Chief Executive of SCIE, said: “The problems social care faces cannot be solved without the people who experience them daily.
“Yet our survey shows that many of those people feel their voices are not leading to action. Despite widespread agreement on the value of co-production, only half of people accessing care and just a quarter of family carers felt that it was making a meaningful difference.
“That perception gap, between process and impact, is not just a communications challenge; it’s a signal that the system still lacks the structures, culture and accountability needed to make co-production real.”
Patrick Wood, Chair of SCIE’s Co-production Steering Group, said: “Ultimately, co-production and innovation are all about change for the better, such as testing new ideas, opening up different perspectives and generating solutions that would not otherwise be tried.
“It’s a cause for concern that only half of the people who access care and support and just a quarter of family carers who responded to the survey felt that co-production was making a difference.
“Addressing the key recommendations contained in the report should help organisations and co-producers to maximise the radical potential and real-world impact of innovation through co-production, and I hope they will act as a spur for further conversations and activities that lead to change in practice.”
The SCIE recently responded to the Government’s announcement that the first-ever full review of Personal Independence Payment (PIP), or the Timms Review, will be led by disabled people.
