23 June 2025
The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) is proud to be hosting its 10th annual Co-production Week from 30 June to 4 July 2025.
Co-Production Week is a celebration of the contribution people with lived experience make to creating better social care. This year’s theme, ‘Innovation through co-production’, is a celebration and exploration of the power of co-production to fuel innovation and design and develop better ways of doing things.
Co-production is about working in partnership with people receiving social care, carers, and families so that they can influence the way that services are designed, commissioned, and delivered.
Throughout the week, SCIE will host a series of conferences, workshops highlighting co-production in action and live interactive discussions on social media—all showcasing real-life examples of co-produced innovation, sharing learnings, and cultivating new collaborations across the sector. We will share resources and tools to capture the impact and difference co-production makes and publish blogs highlighting what’s needed to amplify the experiences and perspectives of diverse groups of people.
We will also be launching our new report, ‘Embracing change: scaling innovation in social care in practice’. Drawing on SCIE’s hands-on work with local authorities and partners across the country, the report explores the barriers and enablers to innovation on the ground, including the conditions and relationships that enable meaningful co-production to flourish. It highlights how local areas have approached complex challenges in new and collaborative ways—offering practical examples of what works, why it works and how it can be replicated or scaled.
Kathryn Marsden OBE (formerly Kathryn Smith), SCIE’s Chief Executive, said:
“Co-production underpins everything that we do at SCIE. We hope that Co-Production Week will challenge, inspire and help shape what good looks like.
“These conversations are essential if we are to move beyond the familiar and embrace new, inclusive and effective approaches to reform.
“I look forward to seeing partners from across the sector engage with the week’s events and contribute to driving improvement in social care. Together, we can embed co-production at the heart of a stronger, fairer, and more innovative system.”
Patrick Wood, Chair of the SCIE Co-production Steering Group, said:
“Co-production is a concept and approach with radical potential. If the core co-production principles of accessibility, diversity, equity and reciprocity (or getting something back for putting something in) were properly implemented, the health and social care landscape in this country would be utterly transformed.
“Co-production Week provides a unique opportunity for people with lived experience and people who provide services to come together and share learning and ideas, with the aim of developing the care and support that people need and want in order to improve their lives.”
For more information about Co-production Week and how to get involved in our programme of events, please visit our website https://www.scie.org.uk/co-production/week/ or follow our social media channels:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/social-care-institute-for-excellence
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/socialcareinstitutepage/
- BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/scie.org.uk
Notes to editors
The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) improves the lives of people of all ages by co-producing, sharing, and supporting the use of the best available knowledge and evidence about what works in practice. We are a leading social care improvement independent charity working with organisations that support adults, families and children across the UK. We also work closely with related services such as health care and housing. We improve the quality of care and support services for adults and children by:
- Identifying and sharing knowledge about what works and what’s new.
- Supporting people who plan, commission, deliver and use services to put that knowledge into practice.
- Informing, influencing and inspiring the direction of future practice and policy.
Our mission is to support best practice, shape policy and raise awareness of the importance of social care, working together. With the government’s ambition of reducing consultancy bills, SCIE can serve as the not-for-profit partner of government, working collaboratively to identify and implement improvements.
If you have any questions regarding this submission, please do not hesitate to contact media@scie.org.uk