24 November 2025
The Social Care Institute for Excellence’s (SCIE’s) new 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% of professionals believe it is currently working well enough to drive meaningful change, only 53% of people who use social care—and just 28% of families—agree;
- People who use social care highlighted that systemic or organisational barriers prevent collaboration from working, and families highlighted that they felt left out of fast-paced decision-making.
SCIE will join other sector leaders at the National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC) 2025 this week to share insights from the report. We are calling for:
- Innovation must be built on collaboration from the start—helping identify what matters most and ensuring that new ideas are actually used and trusted. This will help to break down existing barriers which hinder genuine collaboration—from limited funding, unequal power dynamics, and co-production being treated as a ‘tick-box’ exercise—which helps shape solutions that are fair and practical.
- 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, ensuring that people’s input is visible, acted on and reported back.
- Capacity-building for local systems, supporting shared leadership and consistent feedback loops between strategic and frontline levels.
- National commitment to embed collaboration into future policy, ensuring that reform is designed with people, not imposed on them.
- System reform depends on innovation that is shaped and led by those who receive and deliver care. Without their insight, new ideas risk repeating old mistakes.
As the Government pushes forward with national reform, the lesson is clear: innovation cannot be imposed from above. It must be built with the insight, experience and leadership of the people who live and work within the system every day.
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.
Kathryn Marsden OBE
Chief Executive of the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE)
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
Patrick Wood
Chair of SCIE’s Co-production Steering Group
About SCIE
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 independent social care charity working with organisations that support adults, families and children across the UK.
If you have any questions regarding this submission, please do not hesitate to contact Molly Pennington, Press and Media Relations Officer, at molly.pennington@scie.org.uk