Client: South Ayrshire Council
Date: August 2024 to January 2025
Challenges faced by the client:
South Ayrshire’s Radical Place Leadership journey began with a baselining exercise to understand the story of South Ayrshire as a place and South Ayrshire’s current placemaking journey. There was a shared consensus on the need for change and a shared enthusiasm for doing things differently to take existing partnership working level to the next level. Partners agreed that their partnership working has improved significantly but still had a way to go to enable a systemic shift to place-based working.
Support offered:
Mutual Ventures was commissioned to support the Council and its partners to adopt a Radical Place Leadership approach. This approach would emphasise partners working more closely together and thinking radically about how they can better support residents. The structure of support was delivered through four key stages:
Baselining exercise
Mutual Ventures conducted a baselining exercise focused on establishing an understanding of South Ayrshire as a place.
The Mutual Ventures team reviewed existing strategies and vision statements of South Ayrshire Council and key statutory partners including Police Scotland, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, NHS Ayr and Arran as well as voluntary sector organisations.
The Mutual Ventures team analysed publicly available data to understand the current challenges across South Ayrshire for vulnerable people and how these aligned to organisational priorities in strategies and vision statements.
The Mutual Ventures team conducted 56 leadership interviews with leaders and service managers across the Council, Health and Social Care Partnership, NHS Ayr and Arran, Police Scotland, Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and the Voluntary Sector. These interviews identified strengths and challenges in relation to existing leadership, staff empowerment and community engagement.
The Mutual Ventures team conducted staff surveys to gain a better understanding of their perspectives and current ways of working at all levels.
The baselining exercise informed the first in-person workshops with Community Planning Partners to establish a vision and priorities.
Establishing shared vision and priorities
Mutual Ventures facilitated an in-person workshop with Community Planning Partners in South Ayrshire to discuss the key findings of the baselining exercise and define a shared vision for public service collaboration, as well as agree a clear set of priorities for change. Colleagues agreed to a shared purpose statement rather than additional vision, which focused on each partner playing their part to build empowering relationships with their community.
Following a discussion on the baselining findings, partners unanimously agreed that an Integrated Neighbourhood Team (INT) would begin prototyping in a specific geographical area to enable the team to test new relational working before spreading it across South Ayrshire.
Design and development of neighbourhood delivery model
INTs bring different services together under one physically co-located team with shared values and goals. Organising frontline staff in this way, with an INT based in each area of the borough, offers the opportunity to integrate services and improve the support provided to residents, especially those with complex needs and the highest number of interactions with services.
Mutual Ventures worked with colleagues across partner organisations to develop South Ayrshire’s neighbourhood delivery model, shaped by learning from successful place-based working in places including the Wigan Deal, the Greater Manchester Model, and The Liberated Method. The neighbourhood delivery model set out the key roles in an INT and the capabilities these staff would need to have and principles for ways of working.
Additionally, Mutual Ventures supported partners to agree the four key priorities for the INTs to begin to explore, as well as how they would identify people to support through existing data and knowledge of communities. This work included the development of a prioritisation framework which set out the practical steps for getting started with this work.
Implementation planning
Mutual Ventures developed an implementation plan to enable South Ayrshire to establish a prototype neighbourhood team by April 2025.
Impact
Following Mutual Venture’s support, South Ayrshire are on track to establish their prototype neighbourhood delivery model by 1st April. The Council reflected that they wouldn’t have got so far, so quickly, without Mutual Ventures support which maintained the pace of delivery whilst bringing an outside perspective to support partners to be ambitious.
To find out more about this project and our support, you can view our webinar with colleagues from South Ayrshire here: Watch now: Radical Place Leadership in Scotland
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