30 June 2025
By Kathryn Marsden OBE (Formerly Kathryn Smith OBE), SCIE Chief Executive Officer
There is a lot of talk right now about the immense pressures facing the social care system in England, and rightly so. Workforce shortages, unmet needs, delayed hospital discharges, and persistent geographic inequalities have left many people without the care and support they need to live the lives they choose. Family and friend carers (sometimes called unpaid carers) continue to carry huge responsibilities, often unsupported and unrecognised.
But while these challenges are real and urgent, they are not the whole story.
Social care is also a place of enormous resilience, creativity and compassion. Every day, people who draw on care and support, family and friend carers, practitioners, and organisations are working together to improve lives in ways that are deeply inspiring.
We must change the narrative around social care, because when we only focus on what’s broken, we risk missing the energy, innovation, and humanity that are already driving progress. We need to move beyond tired headlines of crisis and deficit, and instead create space for optimism, reform and action.
That’s why this year’s Co-production Week, running from 30 June to 4 July 2025, is such an important moment. Under the theme ‘Innovation through co-production’, we’re shining a light not just on what’s going wrong in social care, but on what’s possible when people work together to create better solutions.
Innovation is essential, not optional
At SCIE, our work through the Accelerating Reform Fund, and other improvement initiatives, has shown us what’s possible when innovation is meaningfully co-produced. Whether it’s designing new models of care, shifting commissioning practice towards commissioning with people and communities, improving discharge pathways, or embedding personalised support in communities, innovation, when done well, can transform outcomes.
But innovation isn’t just a ‘nice to have’ in social care anymore. It’s essential. The status quo is unsustainable. Unless we change how care is delivered, funded and experienced, more people will go without the support they need, and that’s a price we simply cannot afford to pay.
And yet, despite the appetite for new ideas, innovation in adult social care has often struggled to take hold. Why?
The reasons are many and complex. The sector is fragmented, with over 18,000 providers serving diverse populations and needs. Funding is typically uncertain and short-term, with little clarity on who should invest in innovation, and who benefits. The workforce, already overstretched, has limited time to engage in change efforts. And while there is no shortage of pilot projects or promising practices, too many never scale because the mechanisms for doing so just don’t exist.
Co-production: The missing link
This is where co-production comes in. For too long, co-production has been treated as a tick-box exercise rather than a fundamental shift in power and perspective. Many attempts at co-production fall short, not because of bad intent, but because systems haven’t fully grasped what it means to share decision-making, resources and responsibility with those who draw on care and support.
We have often missed the point: co-production is not a tool to fix problems for people, it’s a way to understand and solve them with people. When done right, co-production doesn’t slow down innovation; it makes it better, more targeted, more sustainable, and more equitable. It closes the gap between policy and practice. It builds trust. And it surfaces insights that no amount of data or strategy papers can reveal on their own.
A platform for national learning
Co-production Week 2025 is more than a celebration. It’s a platform for national learning, reflection, and connection. Over the course of the week, SCIE will host conferences, workshops, and live discussions that bring together people with lived experience, practitioners, system leaders and policymakers. We’ll hear from the innovation projects supported through the Accelerating Reform Fund – why they were set up and how co-production features across a range of settings, with key learning, and we’ll explore what it really takes to embed co-production in practice, not just as a principle, but as a driver of change.
These events are a chance to share what works, to ask hard questions, and to build momentum for a different kind of future.
Join us
We invite everyone, whether you work in the sector, draw on care, care for a loved one, or make decisions that shape the system, to be part of Co-production Week 2025.
