UK Policy Lab, Cabinet Office, for DWP
Building resilience for vulnerable families experiencing relationship breakdown.
The Challenge
Children growing up in homes with poor parental relationships or parental conflict tend to suffer negative long-term outcomes, particularly when raised in families experiencing chronic unemployment, low income, debt, low educational attainment or drug and alcohol abuse.
The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) invested £30 million between 2011- 2015 to deliver support services to troubled families experiencing relationship crisis. However, these services were not adequately reaching and engaging target families. To improve their service reach and impact, DWP needed to gain a better understanding of vulnerable families to inform service improvement and innovation.
What We Did
The project took a sprint approach with an integrated research and design team working closely with service and policy stakeholders. Preliminary workshops were conducted to draw out institutionally embedded knowledge from DWP staff, to help focus the research agenda and develop service-user personas.
This was followed by ethnographic immersions with potential service users to explore their mental models around relationships, their experiences of relationships and relationship breakdown, and the strategies employed by them to navigate relationship conflict.
From the research, we identified key contributors to relationship crisis and breakdown, including poor relationship skills, a lack of positive role models for guiding relationship decisions, and the impact of chronic illness and financial stress on family resilience and connectedness.
Result
Based on research findings, service concepts were developed in consultation with both research participants and DWP stakeholders. Service strategy focused on building resilience before, during and after relationship crisis, and leveraged existing social, educational and health service touchpoints to improve reach and engagement. Service concepts targeted a broad spectrum of potential users, including youth, pre-family and post-family households.
consulted together with: KYSD