New home for our blog

Our blog has now settled in to its new home on our main website. Any blog posts from June 2011 onwards are housed here

So drop in and have a nose around.

Announcing M(ums)-Power

We are working with UCLH, Microsoft, Mumsnet and others to launch a new project funded by the Health Foundation looking to improve antenatal care.  Great service makes a difference, and for pregnant women, that difference can mean everything.  But pregnant women do not always experience great service, without knowledge or control at the vital moment.  This project is about changing that – putting power in the hands of Mums and ensuring antenatal services work around their needs and concerns.

Just 38% of mothers believe they had access to good antenatal information and too few feel as supported as they should.  This project will work alongside women, learning from them to create a friendlier, more helpful and more convenient service.  It will work with the people women meet during their pregnancy, to think about what more they could do to help and reassure them.  It will also look at the tools and systems the service uses.  For example, it will look at what can be done through the internet and telephone to provide good information and access to things like test results and appointments.

From products to public services

In the future, perhaps driving and heating will be public services.  I have written in the past about the trend that is seeing products turn into services.  People are hiring or borrowing bikes, cars and tools in ways they didn’t before.  Now I have a sense of the two forces behind this trend:

1) Economics.  In the past, the progressive compromise was to let capitalism get on with it and to re-distribute income.  As the wealth distribution reaches Victorian levels of awfulness, there is a strengthening view that this is insufficient.  Both Maurice Glasman and Phillip Blond have argued that the state should redistribute capital and not just cash, ‘capitalising the poor’.

2) Ecology.  As we develop the green technologies that can avert climate catastrophe, we will habitually use equipment that is cheaper to run but more expensive to purchase.  Green boilers and cars will generate lower bills but higher prices.  At our Climate Change Dialogue last week, it was powerfully argued that one important green innovation priority relates to the business models that can make this work.  We need companies that can help people adapt to leasing solar panels and cars to help us transition to this new world.

We should not run together issues of justice and the environment too readily – too often, ideological aspiration is framed as planetary necessity.  At the same time, to renew themselves, progressives must be acutely sensitive to strategies that can help both the planet and disadvantaged people.

By John Craig

Learning about the ethic of engagement in my neighbourhood

by Raj Cheema

I’ve recently become a committee member of the Tenancy Association in my neighbourhood. Having lived in the area for three and a half years – I thought it was about time I got involved and found out more about the place. Plus – what better way to learn about Localism – than getting involved locally!

Here’s a little about my small neighbourhood in Rotherhithe. There are a handful of large housing associations operating in my area providing housing to a large number of people. You have young professionals, young families and people who have been unemployed for a long while all living next door to each. It’s diverse in a lot of senses, offers a clean, convenient and safe lifestyle – and makes you feels like you’re not in London even though the City is only 20 minutes away on the bus. There is a lot of modern developments – the dockland’s history isn’t that visible.

Our local Tenancy Association has been dwindling in the last year – engagement from the neighbourhood is at an all time low – in fact for the last six months it’s been pretty redundant and if they hadn’t found some new members – they would have got rid off it. In the past, the TA has done some tremendous work in campaigning for the interests of the residents against the Housing Associations. And realising the benefits of having a TA – the Housing Associations are keen to back the TA and maintain the bridge of communication between them and their residents.

The interesting thing is that people in the neighbourhood ‘want’ to keep the TA but don’t really want to get ‘involved’ or engage in matters that TA deals with on their behalf. Previous members have found that people aren’t interested in engaging and turning up to meetings even when the local MP is in town.

For me the TA reflects the level of apathy inherent in most neighbourhoods. And I want to find out why this is – rather than make presumptions. Is it because:
a) Residents don’t really understand their relationship with the TA – or the TA hasn’t been good at cultivating the right kind of relationship with residents
b) There aren’t any real issues of concerns that residents think the TA could deal with
c) If there are issues of concern – then residents think the TA can’t ‘act’ on these

In the next couple of months – I’ll be knocking on the doors of my neighbours to find out what they think of the TA, whether there are issues that concern them and what they think the TA could do. My goal is to get people involved and engage with the TA so that it channel its efforts to dealing with problems that concern residents. I reckon it’ll be a learning curve – I don’t know yet whether it’ll be a steep one or a small one. But I have a feeling I’m in for a bumpy ride – it’s OK, I have my seat belt on.

Stay tuned if you’re interested in finding out what progress I make in my new role as a ‘localist’.

The World’s Most Innovative Schools: HSRA, St. Paul, Minnesota (“Hip Hop High School”)

(in this video, HSRA’s founder explains what it’s all about)

by Alec Patton

I found out about the Hip Hop High School thanks to the High Tech High School – specifically, Samuel Steinberg Seidel’s article about it in Unboxed, High Tech High’s ‘Journal of Adult Learning in Schools’.

St. Paul, Minnesota’s High School for the Recording Arts (HSRA) is a chartered high school driven by project-based learning, and run on hip hop principles -interpreted by Seidel as follows (this is just a sampling – so to speak – of the design principles that he identifies):

e-Bay, social care and the Big Society

by Raj Cheema

Last month, Slivers-of-Time Markets launched a video about the impact their ‘e-bay’ software is having in the social care market. The aim of the video: getting the message across to central government that their work could be a powerful catalyst in encouraging volunteerism in the social care market – on a local level.

Slivers-of-Time Markets help organisations create an online market place where time from local people becomes the currency between time-seekers and time-givers. For example, Tesco use the Sliver of Time system as an over-booking system to enable their staff to pick extra hours of work. It lets shopworkers sign up for extra shifts in their own or other nearby stores when they have free time to do extra work.

Slivers-of-Time Markets was one of the projects that participated in Innovation Unit’s enabling independent living programme. The organisation wanted to adopt the online software for the social care market and, noting their high-potential in light of the personalising social care agenda, we connected them to six local authorities in London. By enabling individuals to contract directly with one another, Slivers-of-Time Markets opens up the labour market and places control in the hands of service users.

According to a recent report from a group of charities, nearly one in four disabled and older people have experienced cuts to services and increased charges for care, with families “pushed to breaking point”. In a survey conducted by charities including Carers UK, the Alzheimer’s Society, Macmillan Cancer Support and Scope, more than a fifth of respondents said services had been cut back even though their needs had stayed the same.

In this video, Slivers of Time talk about their work with Hertfordshire County Council. Hertfordshire have a large group of elderly people who need support but fall below the elgibility threshold. The online system enables time-seekers to find local (vetted) volunteers who can donate some time and help out with isolated elderly people. The potential of this scheme to transform the way in which social care is delivered personally has recently been noted in the Local Government Chronicle and Community Care.

Slivers-of-Time Markets is now hoping the government will support a series of regional trials to encourage local volunteers to give some time and support local authorities in meeting the needs of the vulnerable. If ever there’s going to be a success story of Big Society in action during the recession – surely this has got to be a strong contender? Good luck Slivers – we have our fingers crossed!

Calling for ideas to tackle local health problems in Birmingham

by Raj Cheema

Young Foundation is scouting for people with big ideas to tackle health problems in Birmingham. If you think you’ve got what it takes, here is your chance to put your hat in the ring and answer four questions:

1. Tell them about the health problem you hope to fix
2. Outline how your idea is big, bold and new
3. What support do you need to get your idea off to a flying start?
4. Who is involved in submitting the idea?

The ten most promising proposals will be invited to attend a ‘Big Idea Bonanza Festival’ on 1st July 2011. The festival will challenge teams to strengthen or create a business in a day, tap into specialist expertise and pitch to a panel of dragons for the chance to win up to £2,000 of start-up funding and bespoke business support.

To apply you must be a public sector employee, third sector organisation or resident of Birmingham or Solihull. They welcome applications from individuals, teams or established organisations looking to launch a new idea or grow an existing service. Closing date is Friday 17th June 2011.

Return completed application forms should be sent to Eleanor Cappell at eleanor.cappell@youngfoundation.org or eleanor.cappell@benpct.nhs.uk (you can also call her on 0121 380 9019/ 07956 317 236).

Learning Futures guest blog post: Accountability

Guest blog post by Martin Said, Teacher at Cramlington Learning Village

Its funny how many times the point of accountability has come up over the last couple of days on my return to school (from High Tech High in San Diego) in the run up to coursework deadlines.

I think I work in a great school which does a tremendous job in taking a comprehensive intake and helping them to be better and more independent thinkers and learners, yet I still perceive a shift in emphasis from the beginning of my short career.

It may be the “rose tinted glasses effect” but it seems that the locus of accountability in quality assurance has moved further from the student towards the teacher. Coursework (seems funny using that word in the new spec vista) was the responsibility of the student to hand in on time to a good standard, now it feels like it is the teachers’ responsibility to get coursework from students. This is not a specific observation to my school but from conversations with colleagues in other schools also.

What is the determining factor here? I don’t know is the honest answer. League tables maybe and pressure upon teachers to meet targets (self imposed or otherwise), and I’m sure that students recognise this. Kids are canny.

Anyway, what struck me about accountability in HTH was one instance where a girl had not completed her engineering project but was still expected to stand by her empty table in exhibition and of course every visiting member of community asked the same question: “Where is your project?”

What a powerful thing to have to describe the mistakes you made, a real learning experience and extremely formative!

I asked the question many times at HTH, “What would you do if you didn’t have Carte Blanche?” and the first response was invariably “Get carte blanche”.

A reframing of the question to “If you could change just one thing in the inherent system…” yielded similarly homogenous responses:

“Start with public exhibition.”

Oh and DTPF!

(Do the project first)

Internocracy and unpaid interns

By Raj Cheema

Great to see Internocracy in the Guardian today talking about the unfairness of unpaid interns – backed by its latest research. The research, carried out by YouGov on behalf of Internocracy – a social enterprise that develops work experience schemes for employers – found that 17% of UK businesses had taken on interns to use as a cheap source of labour, while 95% of the 218 UK managers who responded agreed that interns were “useful to their organisation”. The Internocracy study also found that only 12% of company managers and 10% of young people knew unpaid internships could be illegal under employment law.

Internocracy attended our Beyond Worklessness: A Festival of Ideas event last year and spoke about their ‘Proper Jobs Clubs’ programme of work which aims to set up clubs for unemployed young people to vent their frustrations and anxieties and get advice, information and guidance from their peers who have successfully obtained employement or set up their own businesses. If you want to learn more about this work, then check out the video below.

Technology, maternity and collaboration: OpenIDEO’s winning formula

by Martha Hampson

Following on from my fellow intern Leonie’s excellent first post on cycling, cheap food and community engagement, I was aiming to write something exciting this week about my favourite innovative things (for those who aren’t aware of my iPhone obsession, here’s a clue: one of them’s an iPhone app). Unfortunately, being an intern at Innovation Unit seems to involve doing actual work, and it’s been delayed (though I am very nearly finished).

In the meantime, here’s a short post on OpenIDEO’s maternal health technology challenge, the winners of which were announced today.