ActEarly Co-production Strategy: Nothing About Us Without Us

By Shahid Islam, Senior Research Fellow, ActEarly – Bradford Institute for Health Research - @shahid_islam - and Dr Alexandra Albert, Senior Research Fellow, ActEarly – University College London -  @bun81

There are very few things on which everyone vehemently agrees, but co-production as a force for good, is certainly one that attracts mass support.  

Co-production is not new, it has been around since the 1970s, but only in recent decades we have seen it propel in prominence towards something that can be achieved and delivered.   In practice, co-production is an answer to the question of how to mobilise civil society by using the public services infrastructure to deliver efficient services that are reflective of people’s needs. But to move co-production from a case of marginal experimentation towards the standard way of getting things done requires effort and direction. 

Our ActEarly programme has placed co-production as a central feature of how we plan on getting things done.  This is not only because we believe in the democratic and egalitarian values that stem from co-production (as desirable as they are) but because any attempt to deliver our programme will struggle if communities are not involved in a co-productive way.

ActEarly is ambitious; our long-term vision is to promote a healthier and fairer future for children living in deprived areas through a focus on improving environments that influence health and life chances. This moves away from traditional forms of research which focusses on biological models of treatment towards upstream prevention with a logic that is best described by Desmond Tutu where he once famously said  – 'There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in’. 

The values of ActEarly and Co-production appear to have natural fit but the question of how to make this work in practice may not be as straightforward as fitting hand-in-glove.  To this end we have drawn up a strategy using the Appreciative Inquiry methodology to explore how we can make this work in an effective and inclusive way.  Our strategy embodies the values of Co-production and ActEarly as it was delivered using an Asset Based Community Development approach.

We found that co-production is underpinned by three values and these need to be operationalised through nine guiding principles.  The diagram below depicts the values as pillars and the principles as building blocks. You can access the co-production strategy here and read all about ActEarly here.