The Life Programme

By Participle
In association with Swindon Borough Council & Partners and Headshift Ltd

Swindon Borough Council and social innovation group Participle are pioneering a new approach to supporting families living in chronic crisis. LIFE (building new Lives for Individuals and Families to Enjoy) focuses on unlocking capabilities for families to build and sustain the lives they want to lead.

Families are invited to join LIFE and choose a team of professionals they want to work with. Joint projects allow the families to develop capabilities: beginning to value themselves, build better relationships and contribute to the community around them. The team are trained not to bring their own judgments or agendas so that the programme is genuinely family-led.

An early prototype in 2009 saved over £200,000 in 12 weeks with 3 families by preventing children going into care, reducing court orders and ASBOs. The programme is now live, piloting with 18 families this year.

Designed by families themselves, LIFE marks a radical shift in the relationship between families and services. Implementing it requires significant cultural change. To scale LIFE up across the UK, that change has to be supported in a new way.

NESTA has supported Participle, with social media agency Headshift, to develop web-based tools that will support a social movement around the LIFE approach.

Participle is using an 'open source' model for scaling up LIFE. All the LIFE materials will be available on a shared public platform for feedback and development, so that the LIFE approach can be taken up by other local authorities and adapted to local conditions. This includes handbooks and training videos, tools for families, and evaluation frameworks. Feedback and suggestions from families and professionals will appear on the same platform, allowing the materials to be improved, the content to be further developed, and the ethos to spread - from a position of shared intent.

The success of LIFE stems from the amount of time that team workers are able to spend with families. A key goal is to develop tools that drastically reduce the effort spent on paperwork. Participle is also developing Lifeboard - an online self-reporting tool that helps to capture both 'required' data and softer information to allow families, workers and managers to chart progress in a meaningful way.

The aim of this tool is two-fold: to allow families and the team to jointly capture progress, but also to reduce the time that workers spend on inputting these data into systems.