Despite progress in one-off, 'retail' digital services, like renewing a passport, when it comes to everyday relationships people have with public services, unacceptable or missing digital systems continue to hold the public sector back. This is no more true than within the areas covered by the government's opportunity mission, which aims to set every child up for the best start in life.

From the off, new parents have to navigate interacting with a bewildering array of digital services from booking an appointment to register the birth to notifying the benefits system. The support available to new parents from local, central and devolved government, Family Hubs and the NHS, is scattered across multiple websites.

On returning to work, finding and paying for childcare requires parents to manually join up local provision and the central government tax-free childcare account using a 12-digit number, then separately cross-reference against their provider’s Ofsted registration using a seven-digit number.

Then, once a child is at school, the digital tools that schools use to communicate with parents and pupils are almost universally awful, wasting the time of busy teachers, parents and carers alike. For parents of SEND children, the software for managing Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) applications is designed to meet the needs of the marketing teams of software vendors and satisfy local authority procurement checklists. The needs of parents, teachers and educational psychologists (of which there is a national shortage) who need to co-author complex reports, feature nowhere.

When parents and carers come to book wraparound care, they again find the tax-free childcare account doesn't link up with their local school's app.

On leaving school, students get paper exam certificates and are expected to navigate a rapidly-evolving labour market with little support. That’s because, nationally, there is limited data about what jobs exist, where those jobs are, how much they pay and what skills are needed to fill them. The lack of ready information about jobs and the labour market affects parents and carers too. The National Careers Service estimates that 70%-85% of all vacancies go unadvertised in some sectors (although it is hard to find a definitive source for that often repeated statistic, which underlines that actually nobody really knows). As long ago as 2015, Citizens Advice found that nine out of 10 job adverts lack information about pay and location. People end up taking ‘second choice jobs’ and fall in and out of work, in part because they can’t find work that aligns with their childcare needs.

When families fall apart, the data that professionals need to support those families often doesn't exist. A 2024 report by the National Centre for Social Research, Data in the family justice system, shows that data about a child’s participation in court proceedings and data about who in the family has been the subject of domestic abuse is often missing. This is not a failure of 'data sharing', it's a failure of service design and database design. If children end up in care, foster carers (of which there is also a national shortage) find themselves having to complete self-assessment tax forms (many for the first time in their lives), filling out paper forms for Disability Living Allowance, or barred from using the online passport service (which, like many digital services, have not been designed to cater for children in care).

Almost everywhere you look there are gaps. The public and public servants have to muddle on with substandard systems and data that is often missing or inaccessible. While the type of relationships the public say they want with public services - rooted in outcomes, fairness and respect - often feel like a distant reality.

There are many reasons for these gaps. Most digital work happens within the bounds of a given organisation, so creating joins between services is hard. Digitisation also often leaves the needs of those most in need untouched - business cases that predicate most digital work are based on cost savings and, seemingly, the numbers just don't make it worthwhile.

Systems that are old, hard to change or generally rubbish, are generally referred to as 'legacy systems'. But that lets senior leaders off the hook too easily. It's shorthand for 'it was broken when I got here guv’. The problem is that these systems are often just unmaintained and government has no way of agency over them.

Procurement processes mean that private sector suppliers get away with selling software to schools, local authorities and libraries without pricing in continuous improvement. Organisations wanting to do better find themselves facing barriers to export their data and switch providers.

Policy professionals also remain squeamish about intervening in existing software 'markets' (although they rarely resemble markets!), meaning there is a lack of digital spaces for government to act digitally. For all intents and purposes, many of our 'public' services have privatised their digital parts - there is no 'GOV.UK for schools', for example.

To create opportunities for people throughout their lives, the government needs much better situational awareness about what digital systems it relies on, in both the public and private sectors.

It will also have to take a much more interventionist approach - creating new classes of digital public services and shaping software markets in education and employment to a much greater degree than it has done to date. Below are three examples of such services.

Digital services can abstract away the complexities of dealing with multiple organisations. They can be designed with the grain of people's lives, not the structure of organisations. Amazon, for example, may be a single app, but it abstracts away a network of millions of sellers, delivery providers and technology platforms, that are then networked together in real-time.

Around the world, several governments have applied this principle to design services around specific 'life events', including for new parents. These handle everything from registering a birth, claiming financial support and even registering for a library card.

In the UK, a 'new parents' service might also update Universal Credit claims and help parents manage NHS appointments. As their child grows up the service might let parents book childcare using their tax-free childcare account directly from the service. Later, as their child gets ready to start school the service might also help manage school applications.

There is a risk in designing services like this, that they make things more convenient for people who need it least. For those with the most complex lives, the benefit of removing some friction from common tasks is nothing compared with what remains. So we should also ask: what might a universal new parents service look like designed to serve the furthest first?

It might look something like the example below. Rather than just helping people with transactional tasks - like registering a birth or getting a library card - it could also be a place to surface wider support. That might include things like parenting support, benefit reviews or locally-commissioned services. It could also be integrated with a local Family Hub, so that new parents could discover and access the support they provide without having to visit in person.

By making the tasks everyone has to do much easier, a service like this could have huge scale, reaching the majority of new parents in the country. Putting wider support at the point of use means it could also be a way to systematically scale more intensive support. Even if the majority of parents don’t need it, it will be clear what is on offer for those who do.

The answer to substandard digital tools in schools does not lie in tweaking what exists today. The answer is a mix of creating new digital services that create immediate value, while also using that app to shape the wider market.

A new app for schools, designed around the needs of parents and carers, pupils and teachers could meet common needs like messaging, payments, homework and checking the school dinner menu. The app would also integrate with the tax-free childcare account, so parents and carers could book after-school clubs directly in the app, just as they did in their new parents service. This is possible because, as mentioned in the previous essay, digital services are not limited to a single point of use. Upon leaving school, the app would also be a place to issue digital exam certificates to the GOV.UK Wallet, as well as sign-posting future options.

This approach does not have to be a centralised one. By creating the app as open-source software, local education authorities, academy groups or combined authorities could also take the app and operate their own variant. There are already precedents for this in local government. Open Digital Planning was mentioned in the previous essay. LocalGov Drupal is another example - operated by a cooperative of local authorities and suppliers, it provides a 'council website in a box'.

With enough uptake, the app would also exert pressure on the wider software market. Schools would also be free to keep using their own systems, but government might use its influence to ensure they are interoperable and conform to open data standards. There are already signs of this happening with the NHS App in England and how it integrates with software from commercial vendors.

Digital services could also allow government to do a much better job of supporting young adults leaving school and entering the workforce, and supporting parents to fit work around the needs of their children. The answer, as with the new parents service above, lies in using digital to scale human support for the public. Personalised, human services don’t need to be expensive to deliver.

The idea of more relational, human services isn’t just a ‘nice to have’. You might be thinking that automation and AI mean that things like coaching can be fully automated, but that is not necessarily the case.

It is an understudied area, but even if we are confident that automated systems can surface the right advice to people at the right time, we do not know the limits of automated systems in helping people to trust and act on that information - what is called 'epistemic trust'. Everyone - be it a child in a classroom, a new dad getting parenting support from a social worker, or a new mum returning to work - trusts in knowledge when they feel understood and see that they have been understood by another person.

There is a growing class of commercial digital services that offer coaching services to the public. There are examples in healthcare, therapy, marathon training and music education. They use a mix of live and recorded video, messaging and voice calls, often based around an always-on account. These are not AI systems pretending to be human. Nor are they fully automated. Rather, they are ‘blended services’. They try to engender a sense of social presence while also scaling the ability of professionals to interact with many more users.

This type of blended, digital first, coaching service applied to helping parents and school leavers understand their work options is something that is worth exploring. It could help people map out their future more effectively, and make informed tradeoffs between access to childcare, income, learning and quality of life. We should not think of automation as exclusive of human support and coaching, but rather as a superpower that helps public servants and the public do things that they cannot do today. Radically improving the data about job opportunities, childcare providers and training recommendations with automation and human coaching could help people answer questions they didn't even know they had.

Liz Kendall has muted the idea of 'a jobcentre in your pocket', which could be a starting point for a reimagining of not just how the state helps jobseekers apply for more jobs, but helps parents build careers that work for them and their children.

By creating bold interventions like these, government could not only be creating immediate value for the public. It also gives it a foothold in areas that, today, it is unable to act digitally. Once it has a digital relationship with new parents, and with parents and school leavers, it will have a foundation on which it can build and continue to innovate. Without those foundations, the public sector will continue to find itself held back by technology, rather than enabled.

Richard Pope is the author of Platformland: An anatomy of next-generation public services