Since early in the last decade members of the team have been involved in the development of new collaborative approaches to Public Services leading to new forms of management thinking in Relational Public Services. A significant aspect of this work is led by Professor Toby Lowe where the team are involved in the development and implementation of Human Learning Systems (HLS) through the HLS Collaborative. The Collaborative takes an Action Research approach to learning and have co-produced over 80 case studies demonstrating the impact and diverse international contexts in which HLS can provide as a framework for making progress in adopting a relational approach to public services and their reform.

Other key activities include our work in helping to curate the empirical case for policy change via economic data that reflects relational outcomes. Examples include ongoing work led by our visiting Professor Mark Smith on the generation of insights in the development of approaches such as the ‘Liberated Method’ which generated data to establish a ‘Burning Platform’, a detailed study of service demand and associated costs, profiling the economic and service reform case for relational public services that can scale and sustain.

This is a strand of work that has emerged from the challenges posed by the current scientific orthodoxies of evaluation which face limitations in producing evidence and insight which acknowledge the relational aspects of public services or the reality of evaluative relationships. Our work seeks to propose a new way of thinking about evaluation in policy and practice, in particular, the role development of learning partners. Led by Professor Hannah Hesselgreaves our current activities include our work as learning partners in a range of contexts including with a range of the NIHR Health Determinants Research Collaboratives including Portsmouth and Plymouth where we a working with the team on a learning-based approach to evaluation. Our emerging learning from this work is the subject of an ongoing strand at the annual TRIPs conference and the subject of a forthcoming book.

PERU has a long history of producing multi-agency research across a wide range of social innovations in health and social care, criminal justice, housing, and commissioning. This strand, led by Professor Rob Wilson, is building new information systems and platforms, as essential sociotechnical infrastructure for support relational public services work for those in delivery, leadership, policy-making, evaluation, and commissioning, across a range of national and international contexts.

PERU played a leading role in “Co-creation of Service Innovations in Europe (CoSIE)”. Running across 10 EU countries with 24 partners, the project involved co-designing, enacting and evaluating ten pilots to test and develop diverse methods of co-creation. The pilots had a real-life impact in countries such as Finland, Estonia, Hungary and Spain and the work produced a number of reports and an Edited Book for Policy Press. Future funding was secured for projects to continue; co-creation methods have been implemented; the pilots have been highlighted as hugely successful and influenced further decision-making. The long-term impact of PERU’s work in social innovation can also be seen in the Horizon-funded ‘Innosi’ (Innovative Social Investment: Strengthening Communities in Europe) project, which explored a range of approaches to social investment through pilots across the EU.