ROYAL COLLEGE of art || april/may 2018
childhub - your second home
Project partner: Centre for Public Impact
Team: Francesca Ferrari, Mengdan Guo, Yiyang Hao, Xinru Xheng
Childhub is a model for providing childcare services, based on the idea of the active collaboration between the government and the families.
The childhubs are community nurseries set in the neighborhoods that encourage families to collaborate, build strong relationships between each other and express their demands and opinions in an organised way. The strong connection between the local governments and the childhubs enables the system to be dynamic and adapt to the families needs.
BRIEF
What kind of future service visions can we create to help policymakers imagine what a transformed government could look like in the future?
OUR APPROACH
In our opinion the ideal government should deal with the complexity of public services easily and efficiently and provide policies guided by the actual needs of the citizens.
So we decided to focus on the childcare system in UK, as we recognized its central role in society and we were interested on how it can connect different stakeholders in important social sectors, such as healthcare, education and employment.
RESEARCH AND INSIGHTS
Good quality, affordable childcare benefits society. It helps parents, especially women, to return to work;
raising their family income, strengthening the workforce and improves children’s outcomes. It supports social integration by bringing families and people of different faiths, ethnicities and backgrounds together.
Research shows that strong early education programs can lead to reduced crime and less needed spending on healthcare and remedial education.
Our research, based on the study of documents, data, reports and interviews with parents, revealed the following insights:
1. Childcare costs in Britain are by far the highest in the Western world and they have risen up seven times faster than wages since 2008. Many times it is more convenient for one of the parent to stay at home with the child instead of working and usually that is the mother, which creates new issues for gender inequality
2. The fundings are not enough for the 30-hours of free childcare policy. This results in lack of places for children in the nurseries or higher fees for paid-for hours.
3. Many parents are employed outside of nine-to-five office hours, or they work hours that can change from week to week. Two out of five men are reported to feel “stigmatized” at work because of needing flexibility for childcare, with fewer hours, worse shifts and even losing their job.
4. Parents affirm they would like a greater level of participation in the early years of their children.
5. There is a lack of connection between families in the same neighborhood, which would be important as many parents live far from their extended families and they find difficult to receive support.
Overall the main problems in the current childcare service provision are around the issues of affordability, accessibility and flexibility.
OPPORTUNITY STATEMENT
How might we create a new model of childcare provision that allows the government and the families to collaborate for a more accessible, affordable and flexible system?
PRINCIPLES
Given the complexity of the childcare system and the necessity of a dialogue between the families and the government, we decided to apply to our project the concepts presented in the report Many to Many (IPPR), based on the idea of the relational state, and to follow three main principles:
1. Third sector delivery: they are driven by intrinsic motivation, have a deep understanding of the area, and can count on existing relationships
2. Decentralisation: devolve decisions to local governments and share the responsibilities
3. Building relationships between citizens: as they can have a greater capacity of solving complex problems
SERVICE PROPOSITION
Our main aim was to create a network able to connect the families with local councils and the UK government and start a dialogue. But we soon understood that it was not possible without creating an environment where the families can get to know each other, build relationships and feel free to express themselves.
That is why we created the Childhub communities.
A childhub is not just a nursery, but it is a meeting point for all the families in the neighbourhood. Parents receive guidance and support and they collaborate with the staff and other volunteers to create the best experience for all the families. It is a community constantly evolving to adapt to their participants needs.
The Childhub system is structured in 4 levels.
The first level is based on the families and their relationship. The challenge was building trust between them, the basis of a peer-to-peer interaction. There are three elements that help us to do this: the identity and DBS checks for each member who joins childhub, creating occasions for meeting other members and have experiences together and encouraging mutual aid between the parents through resource-sharing.
The second level is the community, which involves four actions. The first one is recruiting the volunteers and dividing them into groups, based on their interest and skills.
Second, there are training sessions set up for the volunteers by the experienced parents or professionals.
The third action is to connect the members of the community, giving them the possibility of offering or receiving emotional support, sharing clothes and toys and also having experiences together, such as trips, picnics, birthday parties…
Finally we want to empower the families by organising workshops, where they engage in discussions and activities to speak out about their needs and opinions. The outcomes can be managed internally inside the community or they can be discussed with the local authority.
The third level is in fact the local government. Besides having regular meetings with parents’ representatives of the childhubs, collecting their ideas and producing a response; the local authority is also responsible for the setting up and adaptation of the system in the different areas.
It also manages the collaboration of the childhubs and the locals.
Then we have the last level, the UK government, which provides standards, regulations and policies and communicates them to the local authorities. It also collects data from the councils and adapts the policies to the emerging needs of the families.
IMPLICATIONS
The four-levels system can be an effective way to deal with complex problems that need the active involvement of the citizens. Normally it is difficult to hear what people have to say and traditional methods such as individual surveys may be misleading.
By building trust among the citizens and creating communities to stimulate discussions and sharing of opinions, the government can give a stronger voice to the citizens and share the responsabilities with them and the local governments.
The responsibility is a key factor, governments are usually afraid to be innovative because they do not want to make mistakes, but if the responsibility is shared among the whole chain (central government, local governments and citizens) the system can be more flexible and can be adapted gradually.
