by Olivia Davidson and Lorna Scott-Smith, SCIE practice development consultants.
28 February 2025
The Accelerating Reform Fund (ARF) is supporting innovation within adult social care. A key aim of the ARF is to strengthen collaboration across the 149 local authorities within their Integrated Care System (ICS) areas and beyond. The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) has been appointed by the Department of Health and Social Care to provide hands-on support to projects, ensuring local areas benefit from valuable shared learnings, peer support, and expert insights across the country. During mid-term reporting, it emerged that project leads had a desire to come together with other areas that are working on projects of a similar theme to their own so they could ask questions and learn from others.
In response, SCIE established four Communities of Practice so projects could meet in a safe and communicative space to share knowledge and receive peer support.
Communities of Practice
Communities of Practice are a collaborative space where project leads can come together to troubleshoot common challenges, share enablers and resources, and benefit from peer-to-peer learning and support.
As the ARF has 122 projects across 149 local areas, Communities of Practice were identified as a resource with valuable potential for shared learning across consortia.
SCIE’s ARF team identified four themes under which key challenges and opportunities could benefit being addressed through their contact with other projects, as follows:
- Promoting Shared Lives and recruiting carers
- Digital self-service
- Identifying and supporting unknown carers through hospital admission and discharge
- Care Act compliance in digital solutions.
The sessions, developed, hosted and facilitated by ARF practice development consultants (PDCs) at SCIE, took place in November and December 2024 online and included contributions from Experts by Experience, ARF project leads and innovation partners.
SCIE has set up MS Teams channels for each Community of Practice, so peers have a digital space to share knowledge, spark ideas and collaborate, continuing conversations and solving problems together. SCIE PDCs are enabling this by posting case studies, articles, data insights and more to keep the conversation going. A next round of sessions is currently being developed to respond to challenges raised.
The Benefits
The challenges facing the social care sector are complex, but through shared learning, which drives engagement, fosters innovation, and builds relationships between colleagues, we can develop practical, scalable solutions.
The Communities of Practice empower members to take ownership of their learning journey and directly apply it to their work—and to plan and prepare for future opportunities.
The exchange of ideas and experiences sparks creative solutions that might not emerge in isolation. Furthermore, ongoing dialogue within these communities not only strengthens professional networks but also helps embed a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
Through monitoring, evaluation, and learning, we have been able to produce comprehensive worksheets for each theme that break down key challenges, solutions and lessons learned following the active discussions that took place.
Insights we have gathered include:
- Strong co-production with people with lived experience, their families and carers is essential. Establishing co-production groups, particularly those chaired by people with lived experience and carers, ensures that their voices are heard and they play a central role in shaping services. This approach leverages the expertise of those with lived experience, fostering a more inclusive and effective support system. Co-production can also be achieved through working with local community groups already in existence.
- Translating collected data into actionable insights requires active engagement with practitioners, people with lived experience or their family and carers. Continuous feedback mechanisms are essential for improving digital tools.
- Implementing small, tangible changes was emphasised as an effective strategy to win minds and hearts, both internally and externally. Demonstrating the effectiveness of these changes helps to build trust and shows that improvements can be made without overhauling the entire system at once.
- Sustainability involves continuous updates and strong stakeholder relationships, including partnership work across the system – not just financial aspects. Effective evaluation and impact measurement are essential for securing ongoing support.
The Impact
The Communities of Practice have been successful. Many participants found the workshops informative and valuable for understanding the range of projects and learning from others’ experiences. They appreciated hearing about shared challenges across schemes, which they reported as fostering a sense of connection and understanding.
Participants also highlighted the innovative nature of certain projects and how they inspired reflection on their own practices.
One participant said: “I found both the digital self-assessment workshop and the shared lives workshop informative and beneficial to get a better understanding of the range of projects that the ARF covers and to be able to learn from the experiences of others” .
Another said: “I think I’ve learnt more about Shared Lives in this workshop than I have in 20 years of being in social work”.
Recent feedback from the ARF evaluation partner, Ipsos, suggests that projects value the Communities of Practice for networking and gaining insights, and there are requests for more meaningful engagement with systems across the fund through pairing with those. PDCs will shape the next round of online workshops in response to this, along with increasing solution-focused conversations to encourage project progression.
Ongoing updates from the ARF are being documented via the webpage, along with links to existing webinars, workshops, and summary sheets.
With SCIE’s support to the ARF finishing at the end of March 2025, it is essential that projects can share their insights ahead of this—if you are an ARF project and would like to be added to one of the Communities of Practice before this, please get in touch with us via the Innovation Inbox. We hope the Communities of Practice can continue in some format beyond the life of the Fund so the important peer learning and knowledge sharing can continue to be of benefit to innovation across the sector.
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