The report found that when collaboration works well, it generates fresh thinking and solutions that are trusted, practical, and ready to embed in daily practice. However, while 72% of professionals believe collaboration is sufficient to drive meaningful change, only 53% of service users and 28% of families agree.
People receiving care highlighted systemic and organisational barriers that prevent collaboration from being effective, while families expressed feeling left out of fast-paced decision-making.
SCIE will present insights from the report at the National Children and Adult Services Conference (NCASC) 2025, advocating for:
- Innovation to be co-produced from the outset, ensuring new ideas are trusted and practically implemented.
- Long-term investment in people and partnerships, not just projects or technology, including funding for time, infrastructure, and skills to make co-production standard practice.
- Stronger accountability for inclusion, ensuring feedback from people accessing care is acted upon and reported back.
- Capacity-building for local systems, supporting shared leadership and consistent feedback between strategic and frontline levels.
- A national commitment to embed collaboration into policy, ensuring reform is designed with, not imposed on, those who live and work in the system.
The report warns that without insight from those who receive and deliver care, innovation risks repeating past mistakes.
Kathryn Marsden OBE, Chief Executive of SCIE, said:
“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 it made a meaningful difference. This gap is not just a communications challenge; it signals that the system still lacks the structures, culture, and accountability needed to make co-production real.”
Patrick Wood, Chair of SCIE’s Co-production Steering Group, added:
“Co-production and innovation are all about change for the better—testing new ideas, opening perspectives, and generating solutions that would not otherwise be tried. It is concerning that only half of service users and just a quarter of family carers felt co-production made a difference. Acting on the recommendations in this report will help organisations and co-producers realise the full potential of innovation in social care and encourage further conversations that lead to meaningful change in practice.”
