Building partnerships in local commissioning

Dr Philippa Simkiss is Head of Evidence and Service Impact at RNIB, the UK’s leading charity offering information, support and advice to those with and at risk of sight loss. Here she writes about the lessons RNIB has learned about successful charity partnerships in local commissioning.  

When the going gets tough, the purpose of commissioning is to deliver excellent services for those that need help.

What does this mean for people losing their sight? There are almost 2 million people with sight loss in the UK and each year around 28,000 are newly certified as blind or partially sighted. RNIB is committed to an ambitious strategy to end the isolation of sight loss. We have thought about delivery models which work best for us as we know that we can’t deliver our strategy on our own. It is essential that organisations work together to ensure blind and partially sighted people no longer slip through the gaps between different service providers.

RNIB has entered into relationships with other charities to further increase the impact we have on the lives of blind and partially sighted people. The RNIB Group comprises RNIB, Action for Blind People, Cardiff Vales and Valleys and National Talking Newspapers and Magazines. We also maintain close links and support the aims of other organisations, including local, national and international charities working with or for people with sight problems.

A practical example of partnership working at a local level is our Finding Your Feet programme, which helps people who have recently been diagnosed with a sight problem deal with both the practical and emotional challenges of sight loss. You can watch a short film about the project here.

We are currently using funding from the Department of Health to develop a sustainable delivery model for the project, commissioned locally and delivered by local community organisations for and of blind people. When we evaluated the model, we found a number of conditions need to be in place to support future local commissioning:

• Local charities must have the skills, resources, desire and ambition to take on the model as a local franchise.
• Commissioners must be open to joint commissioning and partnership working; have the desire and ability to take the approach forward; understand the benefits of the Finding Your Feet model for participants; and have confidence in the local charity’s ability to deliver it.
• Both charities and commissioners must have a positive relationship with one another.

These conditions are not just specific to our Finding Your Feet programme—they offer wider learning for other charities looking to enter into local partnerships.

These findings have several implications for RNIB. We need to decide whether to target local partnerships with the most ‘conditions’ already in place, and think about how to identify and engage the right people in the right roles in commissioner organisations. We need to engage all relevant partners early on in discussions so we can get the buy-in we need from all stakeholders. And we need to tailor the Finding Your Feet approach to suit local needs and fit with the priorities of commissioner organisations, making it clear how our programme will support and add value to the local eye care pathway.

In this way we can begin to test a local franchise model that is flexible and adaptable to fit into local priorities and impact on other areas of care. This would leave RNIB to play a more strategic role helping to build these partnerships, particularly important in light of new commissioning arrangements.

RNIB is trying to develop the all-charity supply chains highlighted in NPC’s report. This will not happen overnight—partnership building to secure the trust required for joint working takes time. But for those who need help the going is getting increasingly tough and they need excellent services now.

Download When the going gets tough for free from NPC’s website. This is the third in a series of blogs focusing on the changing world of commissioning which run throughout this week.

NEETs charities must work together to prove their worth

Abi Levitt is Marketing and Communications Director for national employment charity Tomorrow’s People. Founded in 1984, the charity has a long track record of success in helping people out of long-term unemployment, homelessness and welfare dependency, and into sustainable jobs. Tomorrow’s People has helped over 440,000 long-term unemployed people on their journey back to work. The charity is one of six featured in NPC’s latest shared measurement pilot, looking at developing a shared outcomes framework for the NEETs sector.

For the last 30 years Tomorrow’s People has been supporting people from disadvantaged communities to get and keep a job, but we have a special concern for young people on the margins who have failed to make a successful transition from school. Since 2004, we’ve focused our support for young people on those 16-24 year olds who are not in employment, education, or training and who other agencies have found hard to reach.

Until last year, our youth programmes were funded only by private donations and those funders have always expected to see tangible results and clear impact measurement to justify their investment. However, as anyone working with disadvantaged young people will know, it is very difficult to understand and evaluate the progress that participants make on a range of hard and soft levels and to keep track of them once they ‘graduate’, so that impact and sustainability can be measured.

It is critical for all organisations working with NEETs to be clear about what success is.

But it is crucial that we have a credible story to tell investors about impact as it is a key indicator of the success of our approach, and the ability to record hard as well as soft data is as important for programme development as it for investment analysis. As a result, we make a great deal of effort to engage with participants for a year after a programme finishes, both to offer support and to measure outcomes.

It is critical for all organisations working with NEETs to be clear about what success is and to articulate it in a way that has currency for investors so that progress can be evaluated fairly and value proven. Unfortunately, the wide range of third sector organisations currently working with young people are doing so without common standards of measurement and evaluation, which make it very difficult for potential investors to judge where they are best to focus their resources.

That’s why Tomorrow’s People was delighted to be invited to join the NPC pilot and to take part, with other like-minded organisations, in a forum to look at the practical steps we can take to build a common standard of assessment. However, there is still much to do, both to convince the sector that it is possible to build a common language across a range of activities and specialisms, and then to convince commissioners and funders that what is being measured is important and of value.

Charities working with young people can and should be collaborating and having an open discussion on how to create universal standards and measure the soft outcomes – like confidence, self-esteem, motivation and happiness – that are often considered immeasurable, but which we all know are vital for development and progress.

Read more about the shared measurement pilot in which Tomorrow’s People took part in Impact measurement in the NEETs sector, published today and available to download for free from NPC’s website.

Minding the gaps

As the dust settled on last summer’s riots, attention shifted from the young people who had been rioting to the ‘troubled families’ they grew up in. David Cameron pledged that his government should be judged on its success at transforming the lives of 120,000 such families by 2015. But in an area where government has claimed it will fix the problem, what is the role for independent funders and charities? Where are the gaps?Troubled families, according to the UK government, are those where parents are out of work, children are not in school, and family members are involved in anti-social behaviour and crime. These problems are often long-standing and inter-generational—children whose parents have multiple problems are eight times more likely to be suspended or excluded from school than other children, and ten times more likely to be in trouble with the police. The 120,000 most troubled families in the UK cost society an estimated £9bn every year.

Troubled families are a UK government priority—last month it committed an extra £448m to target the most difficult families, and has pledged to expand early years services to try to prevent problems emerging. These efforts are encouraging, but they will not reach all families in trouble, and financial pressures threaten the success of work in this area.

Independent funders do have a role to play in supporting these troubled families, but it is not a straightforward one. However, there are gaps where more support is needed and where charitable funding could have  real impact.

• Support for vulnerable families in the earliest years can prevent problems later in life. The government have talked a lot about early intervention, but there are still a lot of gaps to fill—for example the commitment to doubling the Family Nurse Partnerships programme by 2015 will still only cover 40% of estimated need.
• Ensuring the quality of support for the most challenging families. With recent cuts in public funding, projects supporting troubled families face larger case loads, and are having to shorten their interventions and are provide fewer outreach services—which undermines their effectiveness.
• Providing support for mental health problems. There is a need for staff who are trained to recognise mental health problems, make timely referrals and provide families with practical support.

This is a challenging and complex area, but that is not a reason for funders to shy away from it. Charities can make a crucial difference in this area—charities like Family Action, whose Building Bridges project helps families with multiple and complex problems. Helping these families to tackle problems early can prevent a generation of children growing up to face the same problems their parents have. The potential for a positive impact is huge.

A version of this blog first appeared on Latest from Alliance.

Answering the ‘so what’ question

Paul Farmer is chief executive of Mind, the mental health charity. He has worked in mental health for the past 20 years, joining Mind in 2006 following posts at mental health charity Rethink and the Samaritans. Here he writes about Mind’s work with NPC to develop a theory of change.

Mind is one of Britain’s best known charities. We want to see everyone experiencing a mental health problem get the support they need and the respect they deserve. We provide help and support to nearly 300,000 people every year. We are a high profile campaigning organisation giving people with mental health problems a voice. And we’re working in partnership with Rethink Mental Illness on Time to Change, the biggest campaign to tackle mental health stigma and discrimination this country has ever seen.

So what?

That was the question senior managers and trustees within Mind wanted to answer. We might distribute millions of pieces of information each year, but does it make a difference? Does our campaigning work really change lives? Does our local work help people achieve their potential? Like many charities, we believe the answer to these questions to be yes, but do we really know?

As senior managers we know that much of our work is valued, but was there too much emphasis on output rather than outcomes? For trustees, as long term custodians of the charity, the issue was whether it’s possible to find a way to evaluate progress towards our vision over a longer period of time

So we turned to New Philanthropy Capital to help us devise and develop a new evaluation framework. We asked them to work with us to create an evaluation framework to answer the “so what” question. This has coincided with developing a new strategy for the next four years.

It’s been an interesting journey. We started by creating our own Theory of Change—how we believe our work achieves real change for people with mental health problems. We used this framework to create a strategy that is focused on the outcomes that our stakeholders told us were most important to them.

We worked with a small number of departments to build the skills required and an evaluation toolkit. At a governance level, we’ve kept our trustees fully involved. Locally, we’ve run a pilot with five local Minds.

Eighteen months later, we’re here. We have a new strategy with a comprehensive evaluation system in place. We will use that information in our annual reporting so that beneficiaries, donors and other stakeholders can see the impact we’re making. We have the best possible chance of being able to answer the “so what” question.

This week, NPC will publish a guide to theory of change for charities, which will be available to download free from our website.

Hey, it’s ok to celebrate creativity in charities

UK women’s magazine Glamour runs a feature every month called ‘Hey, it’s ok’, listing things that you shouldn’t feel bad about doing because secretly, everyone does them. They’re usually light-hearted and funny—‘Hey, it’s ok to buy an album just to listen to two songs’, or ‘if your hometown accent only comes out when you’re throwing a strop’. It’s a popular column, and a catchphrase that’s well-known to the magazine’s readers.

This month, Glamour has teamed up with mental health charity Mind to launch a campaign around depression. It’s centred on a video called ‘Hey, it’s ok to talk about depression’ which features Glamour readers and celebrities talking about their experiences. The campaign aims to raise awareness of depression as a problem that affects many of Glamour’s (mostly young, female) readers, and encourage people experiencing depression to talk about it, share what they’re going through and seek help.

The Mind/Glamour campaign is a great example of an imaginative and effective way to reach a new audience using channels they are already engaged with and talking in a way which will appeal to them. Hooking the campaign onto an existing popular feature in the magazine is a great move, and by teaming up with Glamour, Mind can reach a demographic who may know about their work but might not think about it’s relevance to them. The partnership has already (a week in) been very successful in reaching out to an audience who may otherwise be hard to reach, and hopefully started to challenge perceptions around depression.

Charities face some of the most demanding briefs when it comes to communications—they have to make people feel emotionally engaged with problems which may seem far removed from their daily lives; alter the way people view particular issues which may traditionally have been taboo; and motivate people to change their behaviour. Doing all this successfully with a charity budget requires heaps of creativity and inspired thinking—and the innovation and imagination shown by a lot of charities is something we should celebrate.

The charity sector is home to so many creative campaigns—from Beatbullying’s Big March, to the hugely successful Movember, which in 2011 attracted over 253,500 participants in the UK alone. Movember achieves the double-whammy of raising awareness of prostate and testicular cancer (you can’t help but ask someone with a comedy moustache what it’s in aid of) and raising funds (over £18.5 million in the UK in 2011) for research into the diseases.

These campaigns just go to show that imaginative thinking is alive and well in the charity sector—creative approaches which succeed in getting people talking about difficult issues like depression, bullying and testicular cancer, and help overcome taboos and social stigma. I’m sure there are hundreds of examples of charities of all sizes who have come up with creative ways to get their message across on limited resources—and would love to see or hear about examples in the comments.

Five reasons to get involved with impact reporting

The demands for charities and social enterprises to provide more information about their work are increasing from all angles. Funders, supporters, beneficiaries, policy-makers, even the media are keen to know about the difference charities make to the people they help and the causes they champion.

But communicating impact through reporting can be a challenge: even when we are sure what we are doing is achieving something, proving it can be difficult.

With money tight and resources stretched, why should charities care about impact reporting? Why is it worth the investment and what’s in it for them?

Here are five reasons why we think impact reporting is important.

It helps engage donors and funders and makes them passionate about your work

Engaging supporters involves telling them a compelling story about what you do. Talking about the impact you make is an essential part of this: in order to win the trust of your stakeholders, you need to tell the real story of what you do and how you do it. We hope that the impact reporting principles that NPC has developed in collaboration with a host of other sector bodies can help you develop this narrative into something funders really care about.

It diverts your donors from focusing on admin costs

Funders and donors can only make funding decisions with the information you give them. At the moment, much of that information is financial based on the accounts charities must produce every year. This is contributing to the myth that you can assess a charity’s effectiveness based on overheads, fundraising expenditure and other admin costs. Impact reporting provides supporters with the right information they need to make an informed decision.

It boosts your accountability and credibility

Charities have a privileged position in society: they are some of the most trusted organisations in the UK and enjoy tax breaks and other advantages in recognition of the vital work that they do and the people they help. Impact reporting is a way of being accountable to your supporters, staff, beneficiaries and the general public and acknowledging the special status charities have.

Impact reporting can also be important for maintaining this credibility—particularly when a charity hits the headlines. The US charity, Invisible Children, came under fire for its Kony 2012 campaign partly because it was perceived to have poor accountability (to which the charity has responded).

It motivates and inspires staff

Impact reporting is often thought of as part of a charity’s external communications. But it can have powerful internal applications as well—not least motivating and inspiring your staff. Impact reporting can help track a charity’s progress towards achieving their vision and it enables staff to see how their work is contributing to the over all goals of the organisation.

It’s probably easier than you think to get started

You don’t need fancy measurement systems to report on your impact (although they can help). Much more important is having a clear narrative explaining what you achieve and how for the people you’re trying to help—we’ve suggested five questions you can use to think through how to write an impact report. Charities we’ve worked with have found they’ve made a lot progress very quickly and they actually had more of the information they needed than they realised.

Last night saw the launch of ‘Principles into practice: How charities and social enterprises communicate impact’ from NPC, CDG and ACEVO. Find out more about the launch here, and read the report here.

The battle for government contracts

Liza Dresner is Director of the charity Resources for Autism, which operates in London and Birmingham. Resources for Autism provides practical services for children and adults with an autistic spectrum condition and for their families and carers. In this blog, she writes about her experiences of government commissioning. 

The changes to the funding landscape over the past few years have been huge—and now we are seeing massive changes in the way our services are commissioned. As a medium-sized charity of 15 years providing practical services, we have a great deal of experience in applying for and often being successful in gaining funding. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult. As we get closer to the budget many chief executives, like me, will have been driven to exhaustion trying to get their bids completed.

Tendering is like going into battle. Everything else has to be put on hold as I complete PPQs followed by pages upon pages of questions, many of which repeat, and some of which are not relevant. Then there may be the version to be assessed by a panel of young people and perhaps the version in which no costs must be mentioned. This can take days. Most ask for around 10 different policies and procedures to be provided, and if this is a hard copy version then we have to produce 3 copies of everything. They can weigh in at a couple of kilos when complete.

I have been told on two separate occasions that we had successfully won a tender only to wait weeks for formal contracts—and on reading these discovered that we have only been awarded half of the tender but no one thought to tell us. Another time it was only when we challenged a local authority on their call that our PPQ was incorrect that they rechecked and confirmed it was their mistake.

Some local authorities want to sit in on our recruitment interviews, complicating the logistics. Do they do so with companies who build their roads or cut their trees?

Recently we are seeing a new phenomenon of huge tender lots being advertised which can only be bid for as a whole package. These cannot be applied to by specialist agencies such as us as we only offer services for those with a diagnosis of autism.  Small but beautiful local organisations providing just one little bit of something like disability yoga are finding they are too small to get involved. The aim here is to have a glorious partnership but that in itself is fraught with problems. Partnerships take huge amounts of time to create and to sustain. There has to be a legal entity of some kind as money is involved. Where do our trustees sit within a new framework, and what happens if it all falls apart through the fault of another of the partners? There are some vast private companies that can provide these packages alone, but surely if the current A4e debacle or the tragedy that was Winterbourne View tells us anything, it is that profit does not sit comfortably in our world.

Then there is the reporting… I have no problem at all with being asked to evidence what we do and am positively delighted if commissioners ask to visit and see what we do. But every quarter I am asked to send in forms. Not the same forms and not forms that want the same information. Some want age, gender, ethnicity of each attendee on everything. Some want ages grouped 5 – 12 perhaps, while others want them grouped 5 – 8, 8- 12 and I even have one that wants those aged 8-9,9-10,10-11,11-12 etc as well as their dates of birth! Others want to know why a child didn’t turn up to a particular session. There is an endless range of combinations and ways of presenting the same material. None of this tells them anything about how good the service is or if the young person had a great time with us or the family valued the break.

Is it worth it you may ask? Certainly, if successful, it can mean some security for us and for those we seek to serve.  To those who have it right like Birmingham City and the London Borough of Haringey who have been the most helpful commissioners I have worked with, I would like to send flowers. There are many who are somewhere in the middle and are trying to get it right. But the worst offenders will end up with poor quality services reflecting poor quality, bureaucratic commissioning—and it is the people who need and use these services who will suffer.

NPC recently carried out a survey of how changes to government commissioning are affecting charities, supported by Zurich. We’ll be publishing the results of the survey later this year. This is the first in a series of blogs looking at commissioning from the perspective of those working on the front line.  

Safeguarding charities’ future

Trustees are the hidden side of a charity that you don’t often hear about—but they are crucial to its success. Only 5% of respondents in a 2006 survey knew that they could contribute to a charity by volunteering as a trustee.  But almost half of UK charities have a vacancy on their board, so there is a definite need for people to step up.

Trusteeship does suffer from a communication problem. People think they have to be old, retired, or vastly experienced in finance or law to interest charities. But misconceptions like this could be stopping many people getting onto charity boards. NPC’s latest report, The benefits of trusteeship, outlines the enormous value trusteeship can bring through the eyes of those involved. We hope it can inform people about what being a trustee is really like, and encourage more people to give it a go.

So what does trusteeship mean to the people we spoke to? Read on to find out…

‘Volunteering makes me a better person’.

Alan Mak is a 28-year-old solicitor, and a trustee of the charity Magic Breakfast—he became a trustee because he feels we all have an obligation to contribute to society, particularly our local communities. But he also benefits from being a trustee—through the sense of satisfaction from his work with the charity, but also in his day job. ‘I get a chance to use and enhance my decision-making, project management and strategic thinking skills. Plus it makes me a more rounded employee’, Alan tells us. His employer, global law firm Clifford Chance, has been very supportive of his role as a trustee, and his volunteering is recognised in his appraisals.

‘Employees bring that energy back into the business’.

So why is it worth companies like Clifford Chance supporting employees to volunteer? BT’s volunteering department are working to support employees to become charity trustees. They see the benefits it brings from a different perspective—employees gain skills and confidence from their trustee role, which they can apply back at work. ‘Being a trustee requires real clarity of decision-making…and building consensus with people from a variety of backgrounds’, says Director of Volunteering Helen Simpson. Simpson says employees’ emotional intelligence increases, and they return with a different view of the importance of relationships. But most importantly, they get excited about the difference they are making, bringing that energy back to their day job and boosting the atmosphere in the office.

‘The trustees are the owners of the charity; they pass the baton on from generation to generation’.

For charities, trustees are an essential part of operations. They set the strategic direction of the charity, oversee its finances, and make sure it is fulfilling its charitable purpose. Trustees also help charities with networking, influencing and campaigning. They are mentors, and ambassadors too. Ciaran Devane, chief executive of Macmillan says a good relationship with trustees is crucial—speaking of the charity’s chair, Julia Palca, he says ‘She is the first person I pick up the phone to if there’s a problem’. Increasingly in the current economic climate, trustees are invaluable in guiding and safeguarding a charity through a difficult economy to ensure it can still make a difference to the lives of future generations.  

Convinced? You can find out all you need to know about becoming  trustee, including where to look for vacancies, in our new report, available to download for free here.

Britain doesn’t count

With so many charities struggling to make ends meet, it is fantastic to see a new charity launching today. National Numeracy will champion the importance of numeracy for all ages, transforming negative attitudes and boosting numeracy standards across the UK. The idea for National Numeracy was born out of research that NPC published in 2010’s report Count me in, but it is only through a great deal of effort by many others that the idea has become a reality.

But why do we need another charity when there are so many already struggling to find the money to survive? In the field of numeracy, the reason is unfortunately all too clear—numeracy skills in the UK are shockingly poor and getting worse. The latest government Skills for Life survey (2011) found that 17 million adults in England (nearly half the working-age population) have numeracy levels at or below the level expected of a child leaving primary school. This has increased by 2 million since 2003. 30,000 children leave primary school at 11 with the mathematical skills of a seven year old, and almost half the pupils in England fail to achieve A*-C grade at GCSE. It is not surprising then that England came 27th out of 65 countries in mathematics according to a 2009 survey of 15 year olds. Something needs to change.

Unless this downward trend is reversed the implications for the UK economy are bleak—not to mention the negative impact poor numeracy skills has on the life chances of individuals and their ability to make a positive contribution to society. People with poor numeracy skills are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as those who are competent at numeracy. A quarter of young people in custody have a numeracy age below that expected of a seven year old. There are plenty more depressing statistics to support the case for better numeracy in Count me in.

The good news is that this situation can be reversed. Huge progress has been made with improving literacy in the UK, and with the right attention (and funding) there is no reason why the same cannot be achieved for numeracy. But there is one important caveat: the widely held negative attitudes towards maths must end. Although 85% of adults think literacy and numeracy are equally important, it seems that it’s OK to say ‘I can’t do maths’, whereas to say ‘I can’t read’ is almost unthinkable.

This attitude must change if we are to stop the rot—it is not an easy task, but vitally important for our economy and for individuals. The determination of National Numeracy, and its supporters, to take up the challenge should be applauded.

Read coverage of the launch of National Numeracy on BBC news and in today’s Telegraph, Mirror, Daily Mail and Sky news. You can also listen to coverage of the launch on BBC Radio 4′s Today Programme.

Nice work if you can get it

This week’s news has been full of stories questioning the operation and even morality of social policy initiatives, from the Work Programme to Nick Clegg’s ‘pay-per-NEET’ scheme. Is it ok to ‘force’ unemployed people onto programmes if it is believed to be for their own good? Do Payment by Results contracts inevitably incentivise fraud?

But just as important is the issue of how we know what social policy initiatives actually work. A few weeks ago Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood floated the idea of creating an institution to research and highlight interventions that work. Since then there have been active discussions within government about how to take these ideas forward.

The thinking behind the idea is that we would make more progress if there was a body that could tell us which interventions are effective—to solve issues like reoffending or drug addiction—and which are not. If we had a kitemark for good interventions wouldn’t that help ensure that investment was directed to the successful ones and away from the unproven or, worse, from approaches already proven to be ineffective? The whole thing is often summed up as a social policy equivalent to the medical advisory body, Nice.

But we need to be clear of the issues that lie in the way of making this a success and avoid excessive optimism and hype.

First, hard evidence of the ‘success’ of social interventions is difficult to come by. That is true even where the aim is clear (like getting young people back to work); there is good, accessible data; and academics have been investigating the area for years with robust methodologies. It is even harder when the outcome is hard to define, the data non-existent or poor, and there has been little thorough research on the topic. We may be able to work out which interventions are not worth pursuing any more but it will always  be difficult to precisely rank them. In that sense the analogy with Nice is misleading as the health sector lends itself more easily to rigorous and repeatable testing and evaluation.

In any case, designing a social intervention that works at all times in all places may be searching for the impossible. Our experience at NPC suggests that, for example, if you want to help children with mental health issues the way organisations need to work is different from school to school and from year to year depending on local circumstance, the economic climate and so on. An intervention that works well inMinnesota or inKampala in one decade won’t necessarily work well inLuton, the Gorbals or Great Yarmouth in another. So maybe the kitemark we want is about good organisations that are learning and adapting to evidence rather than backing a particular intervention.

In addition the ‘only commission what works’ approach feels at odds with the other great current public policy trend towards Payment by Results. Here one does not care how the provider produces the results—indeed one is looking for innovation and new ideas—the antithesis surely of mandating certain approaches. Interestingly the government is currently going big on Payment by Results in the Work Programme, and the inability to handle risk and cash flow has meant that demonstrably effective voluntary sector providers have been badly squeezed in a way I suspect nobody intended. Would a kitemark have helped them there?

There are lots of complications with the kitemark idea. But the basic principle that it is helpful for us all to share knowledge on what interventions work and try and push commissioners towards using those, rather than ones we know don’t, is one that should be pursued. Perhaps if government helped create such a body, donations to charities might also start to be based a bit more on the outcomes they achieve—then we would really see some big improvements in the use of increasingly tight resources.

 A version of this blog appeared in  the local government weekly The MJ recently.

Misspent youth?

Entering employment is one of the most significant transitions to adulthood. Young men who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) between the ages of 16 and 18 are four times more likely to be unemployed later in life and five times more likely to have a criminal record.

This is expensive. Research by the University of York suggests that a young person who is NEET will cost £56,000 in public services and  £104,000 in opportunity costs by retirement age. The costs of the current 16 to 18-year-old NEET cohort will run to tens of billions of pounds by the time they reach retirement.

Yesterday, Nick Clegg announced a ‘payment by results’ scheme where charities and businesses will get £2,200 for each 16 to 17-year-old NEET young person they help back into work or education—with payment staggered so that the full amount is given only if the young person is still in work or education a year later.

Given the huge costs involved, and the current challenges facing young people, this funding seems like good news, albeit a little late. But as ever, the devil will be in the detail…

Working it out

Being NEET for short periods of time is actually quite normal; it is the 10% who are NEET for six months or more that need help most. Although the scheme is focusing on those with below C grades at GCSE, it is not clear whether funding will prioritise the longer-term NEET and provide incentives for working with those who are most vulnerable. Unless this is factored into the targeting and reward structure of the fund, there is a risk that paying by results will simply encourage charities and businesses to ‘cherry pick’ the easiest cases and ‘park’ the more difficult ones.

It is also important to ask whether there will be payments for progress, as well as final outcomes. Building the confidence and skills of a very vulnerable young person, and taking them 90% of the way towards being job-ready, may be much more of a ‘result’ than getting a more able young person into a job. But unless the scheme recognises such improvements in soft skills, it is a result that is unlikely to generate payment.

Finally, tracking hard outcomes is not always as easy as is implied. I do not know of any organisation that can reliably say what happens to all its young people one year after they leave its services. It will be interesting to hear whether the burden of proof around employment outcomes will lie at the door of charities, funders or intermediate agencies. It would be great if the onus is on statutory agencies to capture and release the outcomes data, but I suspect it will be charities that have to carry the costs.

In March NPC is due to publish a report looking at measurement issues facing charities working with young people who are NEET or at risk. You can read Getting back on track, our 2009 report on young people who are NEET, on our website.

The importance of mental health problems are too often lost in translation

Mental health problemo kosti societo billions da funto. That’s Esperanto for ‘mental health problems costs society billions of pounds.’ Too often, experts don’t translate their jargon into the language of their audience; this is true of mental health and employment as it is of many areas.

NPC has tried to translate the jargon into a simple guide for funders, launched yesterday: Job well done: Employment and mental health problems. To mark the launch, NPC and the Centre for Mental Health hosted a debate amongst experts about what works in mental health and employment. Our biggest challenge now is communicating the messages from this discussion to those who can do something about the problem: philanthropists, employers and government. We need to translate our expert jargon into their language.

The experts broadly agreed that two main things need to happen if more people with mental health problems are to gain and retain employment, which I’m going to talk about below. Under each, there’s a role for philanthropists, employers and commissioners:

1. We need more effective employment support for people with mental health problems. As of 2008, only half of those suffering mental health problems were receiving employment support from government, and only a fraction of these are likely to receive the most effective support: Individual Placement and Support (IPS). IPS is designed to help people with severe and enduring mental health problems back to work. It joins up employment advice and treatment, and places people directly into jobs they want. So far it has only been adopted in about 1 in 6 mental health trusts in England. IPS is the most proven approach, but is not the only one. Charities deliver a range of employment support, many with promising results (including Mental Health Matters‘ ‘Back in Touch‘ service and Hillside Clubhouse‘s transitional employment scheme). However, these need more robust evaluations to prove they help people back to work.

Philanthropists could… spread IPS by directly funding charity employment advisors to deliver IPS within NHS mental health teams; fund the Centre for Mental Health to train government employment advisors to deliver IPS; fund and evaluate promising but less proven approaches like those provided by Mental Health Matters and Hillside Clubhouse.

Commissioners could… use central government funding to fund employment advisors to deliver IPS.

2. We need to make more workplaces mental health friendly. Not enough employers realise mental health problems are affecting their staff. In fact, the problem affects millions and costs employers £20bn every year. Many also don’t know there are solutions provided by charities like Stand to Reason, Mind and the Centre for Mental Health. Their services to employers can prevent mental health problems arising, and support people with mental health problems to manage their condition and stay in work. Employers need to be convinced that improving mental health in the workplace will benefit the bottom line. We need to show them the huge costs and likely savings: as much as £2.50 for every £1 spent (see Job well done for these calculations). But there is another business argument: caring employers, who take care of employees’ mental health, are most likely to thrive (see Who Cares Wins).

Philanthropists could… scale up services for employers that improve the mental health of their staff run by charities like Stand to Reason, Mind and the Centre for Mental Health. ’Strategic’ core funding could help them grow and reach more employers. Funding for impact evaluations would show whether these schemes create savings for employers, helping build the business case for investment.

Employers could… invest more in making their workplaces mental health friendly, using services provided by Stand to Reason, Mind and the Centre for Mental Health.

So there is a huge amount that philanthropists, employers and commissioners could do in this area. But why would they? What do they get out of it? I think there’s a pretty strong case for action:

Philanthropists can transform the lives of people with mental health problems and generate a huge return for society. They can expect a positive social return of at least £1.50 in social value for every £1 invested. This is real money in the pockets of individuals, employers and government.

Employers can expect to improve their bottom line and sustainability. They could save £2.50 in reduced leave and increased productivity for every £1 invested (see Job well done). Being a caring employer can help build a sustainable business.

Government can make big savings. By providing effective employment support, commissioners should increase the number of people with mental health problems who are working, so increasing tax take. It should also reduce people’s reliance on health services, because appropriate work can improve mental health.

NPC and the Centre for Mental Health are keen to follow-up on this roundtable. We want to reach beyond the experts to philanthropists, employers and commissioners. We’ll make sure we speak to them in plain English, not Esperanto…

Job well done: Employment and mental health problems

Mental health is key to well-being. It affects our relationships, our work and our overall happiness. But at any one time, one in six people are suffering from mental health problems. This costs society £67bn every year—as much as the government has recently spent bailing out UK banks.

Today, NPC launches Job well done, our report on mental health problems and employment, which looks at what funders can do to reduce these huge costs and improve people’s lives. Right now we are holding a roundtable with the Centre for Mental Health to discuss the report’s findings, and wider issues around employment and mental health problems.

Look out on our blog tomorrow for more on today’s roundtable – but in the meantime, head over to Alliance Magazine’s blog to read report author Benedict Rickey’s thoughts on what the research has taught us.

Six steps to building the social investment market

Yesterday, NPC conducted an experiment. We convened a roundtable with about 30 social investment experts, including Iona Joy (NPC), Nick O’Donohoe (Big Society Capital), Adrian Brown (Boston Consulting Group), and Danyal Sattar (Esmee Fairbairn). We asked them where social investment is going.

Is social investment about to take off or crash dive? Are the current social investment lenders the vanguard of a global revolution in financing? Or are they inflating a financial bubble that promises much and delivers little?

We did not get a single conclusive answer, but we did get some very intelligent responses. By the end of the discussion, I felt we had a ‘big picture’ view of where social investment is, where it is going, and the barriers it faces. In short, we came away with the big issues we need to resolve if social investment is to work for society in the UK.

Here is my attempt at a summary of the discussion:

• We need to sort out the plumbing before we turn on the taps: In other words, we need to make sure regulation, legal structures and tax structures encourage, or at least don’t create barriers to, social investing. We all agreed that CC14 (the new Charity Commission guidance) was useful. However, our legal categories (charity, company) are too binary for social investment, which is about creating social returns but doesn’t care if that is achieved by a business, a charity, or a social enterprise. Plus the FSA is largely ignoring social investment, leaving it to operate (to some extent) in a regulatory vacuum.
• We need to expand the lending infrastructure. When Big Society Capital starts lending later this year, there is a risk that it will overwhelm the relatively limited pool of current intermediaries, who make social investments. There are around a dozen national and several dozen local intermediaries. If they don’t have the capacity to lend the money, there is a risk it takes a very long time to reach the organisations it is supposed to finance.
• We need more dedicated ‘salesmen’. If social investment is to grow into a ‘market’, there needs to be a constantly growing pool of investors putting in money. At present, there is a trickle of grant-makers and high net worth individuals pitching in £100,000 here or £50,000 there. To achieve a jump in scale, we need ‘dedicated capital raisers’, or salesmen. They would talk to investors to understand their needs, provide data on social investment products (eg, historic performance), and then pitch for investment. ‘This groundwork is not being done at the moment‘, one of yesterday’s participants commented. But it needs to be done if the market is to grow.
• We need to build a pipeline of investment ready charities and social enterprises. ‘Social investment’ is on the lips of pretty much every charity chief executive I’ve met in recent weeks. Its gone viral. A huge amount of work is needed to turn this buzz into actual deals. Social investment won’t be appropriate for many charities or social enterprises – the minnows, the ones with unstable income, the ones without assets are all unlikely to be candidates. We need to provide guidance to help them realise this. We then need to support those for whom it might be appropriate to get ‘investment ready.’ This could mean anything from a training session for a finance director, to consulting work to restructure their business model. We need a greater range of investment readiness support out there, and more of it.
• Government needs to make sure commissioning supports the sector to take on social investment. To take on social investment organisations need a strong revenue stream. Government is one of the main sources of revenue to the social sector, but the government is cutting back. Plus, as contract sizes grow, fewer appear to be going to charities and social enterprises. If these trends (cuts and larger contracts) continue, many will have access to a growing pool of capital, but a shrinking pool of revenue. They’ll be like someone on minimum wage with a massive overdraft limit. If government made contracts more accessible to charities and social enterprises this would massively help social investment take off.
• We need more consensus on measuring social returns. We need more consensus about how to assess and report on the ‘social return’ created by investments. A single measure of social return is probably a step too far. More ‘shared measurement‘ – agreement on how to measure impact in fields like homelessness or mental health – is probably the best way forward. We all agreed that reporting requirements need to be proportionate to the size of the organisation and the investment. However, there was also a recognition that not all investors are as interested as they could (or perhaps should) be.

So there is a huge amount of market building to do if social investment is to fulfil its potential to revolutionise financing in the social sector. No-one in the room underestimated the task ahead. But there was a sense of cautious optimism that a lot could be achieved if we moved together in the same direction.

NPC is running several half-day workshops for charities on an introduction to social investment – visit our website to find out more and sign up.

Read more about our social investment roundtable in blogs by NPC’s Head of Charity Effectiveness Iona Joy for Alliance and Chief Executive Dan Corry for the Guardian.

Early intervention, mentors and spin doctors: Learning from last summer’s riots

Gracia McGrath OBE is Chief Executive of Chance UK. Chance UK is an early intervention organisation that prevents crime and anti-social behaviour by matching mentors to 5-11 year old children with behavioural difficulties. The mentors deliver an intensive and individually tailored programme for each child, which builds their confidence and self esteem. Yesterday Gracia presented to a roundtable of the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel, and here she gives us her thoughts on that discussion. 

In the 6 months since the summer riots Chance UK have been asked 1000 times what the causes were, but only 3 times what solutions there are. It was with this in mind that I was delighted that the Riots, Communities and Victims Panel asked me to present at, and take part in their roundtable. I also felt that their focus on building resilience and looking for ways to develop a positive mindset was a good starting point for discussion.

As a solution-focused organisation Chance UK concentrates on how we might do things better in the future, and keep the hand wringing and navel gazing to a minimum. But I guess a little time is required to look at the causes of the riots.

From the perspective of the children we work with at Chance UK, the first thing that strikes you is the lack of aspiration in both a mental and literal sense. How do you get an idea of ‘what you want to be when you grow up’ if you don’t know anyone who works? How do you know what your city looks like, never mind what opportunities might be out there for you if you have never been outside your estate?

There has been a lot of argument on how much influence gangs played in the organisation of the riots, and nobody seems to agree on this. I think that question is not relevant. In an area where gangs are prevalent (and that encompasses all the areas where there were riots) what we see is a general erosion of acceptable behaviour, and a high tolerance of violence and criminal activity. Gang leaders may make very bad role models but what happens when they are the only ones on offer?  This makes a community more tolerant or at least more afraid to challenge what has become the status quo in some areas. They are also more likely to accept the kind of reckless violence and criminality we saw last summer.

One statistic we haven’t heard enough about is that one third of all those 10-17 year olds arrested in the riots had been permanently excluded from school in the last year. This figure may be very much higher when you look at the number of ‘unofficial’ exclusions that are now so common, as schools struggle to meet unrealistic targets.

All of these causes boil down to one thing: that people do not feel they have a stake in their own community and therefore are looking for an alternative societal or family group. Today at the roundtable I heard a number of examples of places that didn’t get looted or burned. Places like Hackney Empire, right in the firing line but so embedded in the community that rioters did not attack it.

So how do we deal with these issues in order to ensure that this does not become a regular part of our social landscape?

Firstly we need to be working with children at a very young age. We need to address issues as they start to show themselves, when it is relatively cheap (in comparison to repairing destroyed communities and paying for more prison places) and easy to do so. We need support for children in primary or secondary schools to prevent them getting excluded and losing out on all the educational opportunities others enjoy. We need support for families that are struggling and  this means not closing family centres and Sure Start programmes that have proved successful. We need to maintain services that can engage the most hard-to-reach families rather that weighing up the cost per head and deciding it is too expensive to do so.

We also need to ensure positive role models, within families and communities, are able to show children a future that includes them, and a way to access it. This has to include a move to ensure that fathers are encouraged to stay involved with their children both practically and legally. A lot has been said about positive male role models for boys, but girls also need a positive male role model and this has largely been ignored.

I know it probably isn’t popular to say it, but there are some very bright people running gangs, and if their skills of leadership and influence could be harnessed for good then we have some ready-made mentors out there. And what of mentors? Chance UK has 17 years experience of matching adult volunteer mentors with primary age children and has proved how beneficial they can be in helping a child find a more positive way of finding the attention they so desperately need. But there is a presumption that mentoring is easy, cheap and can’t really do any harm, and it is definitely none of those things. All the research shows that mentoring programmes with robust structures that are time-limited, goal-oriented with clear adherence to the model have very beneficial outcomes for the majority of children.

Finally I would like to see more positive child and youth role models represented in the media. Young people who are celebrated for educational and sporting successes, or for their engagement in their own communities. At present children and young people are represented in the media only as ‘hoodies’, gangsters and criminals. The only other young people represented are x-factor winners and soap stars and many of them are not very well behaved. Of course, all of this sells papers but we know where a concentration on that gets us! I would like to take a leaf out of Tony Blair’s book and hire ourselves a spin doctor to get good stories about children and young people in the media. It will serve to show that you don’t have to wait until you are an adult to be a good role model… Alastair Campbell, what are you up to these days?