2 July 2025
Urgent action is needed to scale up innovation in adult social care and meet the growing demands on services, particularly for unpaid carers, according to new insights from the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE)’s report launched today, Embracing change: scaling innovation in care in practice.
Drawing on work with over 120 local projects funded through the Department of Health and Social Care’s Accelerating Reform Fund (ARF), the findings highlight a rare, extensive practice-based testbed on how innovation can be effectively developed, embedded and scaled within adult social care.
Over 70% of these projects are directly supporting unpaid carers, a group vital to the sustainability of the social care system, but too often left without the help they need. According to Carers Trust, 80% of local unpaid carer services report an increase in unmet need.
The learnings on barriers to and enablers of innovation emerging from SCIE’s work are invaluable for the wider sector, as they provide a clearer understanding of what approaches people use, and what works in practice. Given the limited evidence and learning on this topic at this scale in adult social care, these findings should be seen as the beginning of a significant journey towards improvement.
The work demonstrates that scalable solutions already exist, but these need leadership, long-term investment and supportive policy to become business as usual.
Urgent action is required on social care reform. We cannot wait for the Casey Commission report in 2028; immediate solutions are necessary to deliver for unpaid carers and stabilise the sector. The projects funded by the ARF have the potential to achieve this, as they are:
- creating a pipeline of scalable innovation to improve the efficiency, integration and quality of care
- in line with the Government’s missions, delivering learning to solutions that address the 10 Year Health Plan’s three shifts: hospital to community,
analogue to digital, sickness to prevention - enshrining ‘home first’ principles that enable people to live independently for longer, such as the Shared Lives service, ready to be deployed now.
We believe innovation, whether incremental, radical or disruptive, can play a significant role in achieving a better future for people who draw on care and support and their carers. Currently, unpaid carers remain under-supported, and a sustainable future for social care depends on embedding innovation in reform. The projects, funded by the ARF, have demonstrated the creativity and commitment present across the sector.
We now know more than ever what it takes to make innovation work. This programme has given permission to local leaders to think differently and act boldly. The challenge is to support and grow this knowledge across the system by embedding this learning into policy, practice and funding decisions. Innovation cannot be an afterthought. It must be core to how we design a better, more sustainable future for care.
Kathryn Marsden OBE (formerly Kathryn Smith)
Chief Executive of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE)
The report comes during SCIE’s tenth annual Co-production Week (30 June – 4 July 2025), a celebration of the role meaningful collaboration with people who draw on care and support has in designing and developing better ways of doing things in social care.
While the Casey Commission and 10-Year Health Plan may shape the longer-term future of care, SCIE is calling for immediate steps to apply these learnings now, and to ensure innovation is central to a future National Care Service. SCIE is calling on national leaders to:
- build innovation into policy reform, starting with co-production with people and communities
- incentivise innovation by taking a multi-year innovation fund approach and funding the infrastructure
- invest over several years to build capacity, skills and networks for innovation, including significant investment in digital support and guidance for commissioning innovation
- create a flexible regulatory space that enables a culture of testing and learning through innovation.
SCIE will build on this work to plan what a good social care innovation system should look like, working with partners to help make innovation business as usual.
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