This proposal builds on the findings from a two-year AHRC funded research project which was undertaken between 2019-2021. It examined how and why, despite a long-standing international discourse about participation, approaches to increase cultural participation have largely failed to address social inequality in the subsidised cultural sector. It further examined why meaningful policy change has not been more forthcoming in the face of such apparent failure. What we found was the extent to which a culture of mistrust, blame and fear between artists, organisations, funders and the public has resulted in a policy environment that engenders overstated aims, accepts poor quality evaluations, encourages narratives of success and is devoid of meaningful critical reflection. In our academic research outputs we argue that this absence of transparency and honesty limits the potential for "social learning" (May, 1992) which is necessary for greater understanding about the social construction of policy problems, something which is a precondition to any radical change in policy. We offer suggestions as to how failure might be better acknowledged, learnt from, and acted upon by policy makers, funders and art organisations and have developed frameworks and tools which are intended to be of practical use to those working within the cultural sector, in particular those involved in policymaking and grant distribution, but also to evaluators and managers of participatory programmes. By employing participatory research approaches during our earlier research process and co-creating knowledge with our research participants, we have given policy makers and practitioners a real stake in our research. As a result there is a strong appetite from the cultural sector to test our research findings in practice. We have already had requests from a number of evaluation consultants, policy makers and arts networks to work with them to embed our recommendations in practice. Some of these are represented in letters of support attached to this application. This proposal therefore seeks funding to support a number of initiatives to test and develop the recommendations, frameworks and tools designed out of our research in policy and practice. It will do this by working in collaboration with industry, including cultural practitioners, cultural policy makers and evaluators on a number of case studies of learning from failure. It will also build new audiences for the research through feasibility studies with health workers as well youth work and community services to test the applicability of our findings on other parts of the public sector. Funding therefore would specifically be used to - support at least 6 champions from different locations and/or different parts of the arts sector to extend the reach of our research by facilitating opportunities for their networks to discuss failures openly - partner with a targeted group of funding organisation to embed our approach in policy - partner with at least 2 organisations outside the cultural sector to test the transferability of our findings to new audiences - deliver a media campaign to raise awareness of our research - encourage more open conversations about failure to take place by arranging a 'Failspace' conference for cultural sector professionals - create an online repository of 'Failstories' that will act as a longer term legacy of the work

Child protection systems across the English-speaking world have been subject to damning critique in recent decades, to the extent that some commentators conclude that they may be doing more harm than good. A recent UK government-sponsored review conducted by Professor Eileen Munro argues for fundamental change in child protection practice and culture. Specifically, Munro argues that 'Local authorities and their partners should start an ongoing process to review and redesign the ways in which child and family social work is delivered, drawing on evidence of effectiveness of helping methods where appropriate and supporting practice that can implement evidence based ways of working with children and families' (2011, p.13)' Munro identifies the need to 'help professionals move from a compliance culture to a learning culture' (2011, p.6). Munro's recommendation forms the central objective in this proposal: to help children and families social workers in two local authorities review and redesign their services in line with evidence of what is known to be effective and to do so in the context of a learning culture. The project partners include social work and knowledge exchange (KE) academics at the University of Edinburgh and key managers and practitioners in two neighbouring local authorities, The City of Edinburgh and East Lothian. The proposal builds upon a previous successful project, which involved academics and social work practitioners from six local authorities working together on small pieces of practitioner research around effective practice in working with involuntary social work service users, involuntary being understood as those whose contact with social work was mandated. The focus of three of these projects was on children and families social work. This new proposal takes the findings of this project forward, casting the spotlight across a wide spectrum of social work practice with children and families. Historically, social work agencies have invested in training events and initiatives in the hope that learning on these might be cascaded from participants into wider organisational structures. The evidence for this sort of transfer of learning is not strong. On the contrary, it is known that very little training activity results in positive changes to practice. One of the reasons for this is that training often occurs as a free-standing activity that is not clearly linked to organisational or practice objectives. Models of knowledge exchange, through recognising the prior knowledge, skills and values that practitioners bring to a subject, are considered to be more effective than traditional training initiatives in getting knowledge into practice. In this project we will utilise specific knowledge exchange activities, derived from the literature and shown to be effective in our previous project, to help bring about cultural change in the partner local authorities. Our proposal consists of three strands, a horizontal one that will operate across organisations to discuss key themes relating to the current discourse on child protection; a vertical strand, which will aim to support practitioners develop examples of what is known to be effective practice and a third strand, which will work with managers around effective learning transfer. Together, the various strands are in line with Nutley et al's (2007) organizational excellence model of knowledge exchange whereby organisations, working in partnership with universities, become the locus for local experimentation, evaluation and practice development. Our project will offer pointers and models about how cultural change in child protection might be brought about more widely. As such, it will be of interest to local authorities and to Government bodies across the UK and thus holds out the potential to evidence demonstrable social policy and practice benefits.

The Place-Based Climate Action Network (P-CAN) seeks to strengthen the links between national and international climate policy and local delivery through place-based climate action. The Network is innovative in its focus on local decision making. Clear policy signals by the government are essential, but the key to continued climate action increasingly lies at the local level, with the participation of local actors, businesses and citizens. Important decisions about low-carbon business opportunities, renewable energy investment, urban transport, energy management, buildings efficiency and the management of climate risks are decentralised and taken across the UK. P-CAN is about engagement, impact, and the co-creation and sharing of knowledge. The Network has the following components: 1. Place-based climate change commissions: We will develop three city-level climate commissions, in Belfast, Edinburgh and Leeds. The concept is currently being piloted in Leeds as an innovative structure for sustained two-way, multi-level engagement between national and local policy and practice. We will work on the replication of these commissions in other local context to further broaden our reach. 2. Thematic platforms: There will be two theme-based platforms, on business engagement and green finance. These virtual networks will focus on two stakeholder groups that are particularly important for place-based climate action. They will be co-created with representatives from the business and sustainable finance community. 3. The P-CAN Flexible Fund: We will open the Network to the wider community of climate change researchers and research users by commissioning 20-30 small grants. The grants will be awarded competitively, with a focus on engagement activities, user-oriented analysis, innovative approaches and support for early-career researchers. 4. Communication and user-oriented research synthesis: An active outreach strategy will connect the place-based activities and inform wider climate action by co-producing, synthesising and communicating decision-relevant analysis. This programme of user-oriented outreach will leverage the work of P-CAN's host institutions and other ESRC investments. P-CAN is led by an experienced team of senior academics from a diversity of backgrounds. They all have strong track records of engaging with decision processes at the local, national and/or international level. Most of them have combined academic achievements with careers in business, finance, or international development. The Network PI is a former member of the Committee on Climate Change. The core team is supported by a full-time Network Manager, a Communications Officer and a group of Network Analysts who will provide analytical, administrative and logistics support for the five platforms (three local commissions and two thematic platforms). P-CAN will, to the maximum extent possible, leverage the existing administrative, research and engagement capabilities of its host institutions, including the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, and the Centre for Sustainability and Environmental Governance in Belfast. P-CAN will be successful if it can inform the climate change decisions of stakeholders across the five platforms. We will focus on activities that support key UK policy objectives and their local implementation, such as the city strategies of Belfast, Edinburgh and Leeds, the UK Industrial Strategy, the Clean Growth Strategy, the statutory carbon budgets, the 25-year Environment Plan, the next Climate Change Risk Assessment, the recommendations of the UK Green Finance Task Force and the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) as well as the climate strategies of Scotland and Northern Ireland. P-CAN will respond flexibly to evolving demands. This will ensure that the platforms we create become self-sustaining and can be replicated elsewhere.

WHY DO WE NEED THIS STUDY? Children and young people who live with domestic abuse (DA) are at risk of a range of negative mental health, educational and social outcomes. Despite increasing recognition in recent years of the impact of DA, we lack enough evidence of how to improve outcomes for children. Our team consulted with children and their carers in setting up this project and were told that there are too few good services to help children recover after DA, that some services (especially criminal justice and social care) do not listen enough to children and carers, and that there needed to be better communication between services. DA is major concern in public policy, but there is wide variation in what services children can access in different local authorities. People who commission services also note that there is not enough good evidence of what works in supporting children who have experienced domestic abuse. Our study addresses this gap by assessing promising innovations in social care in England and Scotland in police and criminal justice, social work and in domestic abuse and children's organisations in England and Scotland. We will assess how these innovations have developed, how children and their carers experience the innovations and whether it improves their wellbeing and sense of safety, how the innovation changes service responses, and how easily the innovation could be used in other services, nationally and internationally. This will contribute to the evidence of what works in support for children who experience domestic abuse, and will also provide an understanding of how other organisations in the UK and internationally might adapt and implement similar services effectively. WHAT WILL THE STUDY INVOLVE? We will evaluate the client, service and implementation outcomes of 6 innovations: Safe and Together, which aims to improve social work responses to families who experience domestic abuse; Operation Encompass aims to ensure support to children after police have been called to a DA incident; an innovation to support children who want to be involved in Domestic Homicide Reviews after a loved one has died because of DA; and 4 interventions to support mothers and children or babies recovering from DA. We will work with children and carers through co-production groups to design, deliver and share our research. In each setting we will talk to children and their carer / parent about their experience of the service, and whether they felt it helped them. We will use questionnaires to assess whether the services positively impacted their wellbeing and feeling of safety. We will also talk to professionals who deliver the service, managers and other professionals, to explore what has worked well, what has worked less well, how other organisations could adapt and use the same kind of intervention. In addition, we will analyse routinely collected anonymous service data (like referral patterns, what happens to families after the service, whether they drop out, etc) to see if there is evidence that services have been improved because of the innovation. We will share what we learn with policy makers, practitioners and service managers. This will include our analysis of what works to support children who experience DA, but also our insights into how social care innovation can be built more broadly in a way that involves children and carers in service design, delivery and evaluation. WHO WILL BENEFIT? By finding out what works, we will improve services and outcomes for children and carers affected by DA. People make policy and commission services will be better informed about the effectiveness of each innovation, and will also understand better how innovation can be supported in social care. Our project will also help to build the social care work force, with skills in supporting children affected by DA, and skills to work with children and carers to develop,deliver and evaluate innovative services in social care

The vast majority of cultural organisations face significant barriers in transitioning towards networked, online cultural and business models. We call this the 'New Real.' New literacies and skills are needed to develop and delight online audiences while negotiating the profound, complex challenges surrounding safety, privacy, transparency, and misinformation in networked environments. Being able to critically reason about the function of a system makes us more resilient in the face of future system failures, or can help us to make judgements about whether systems are safe and ethical. Our project responds directly to this need. Qualitative research through participatory design and ethnographic methodology will investigate the potential for strategies from data arts to be tailored and situated for organisations newly producing online experiences. It will specifically address the design of online and hybrid experiences to both delight audiences and develop critical literacies around the underlying tensions and moral dilemmas in the New Real. Aim: to better understand how to facilitate and accelerate the transition to resilience through new cultural, social and economic models for the UK's world leading cultural sector. This is supported by three concrete Objectives (O), each corresponding to a work-package (WP) and research question (RQ): O1: Understand the strategies used by data arts practitioners and organisations to delight audiences and build critical literacies in the New Real. O2: Co-design pathways with cultural organisations towards new forms of pandemic-resilient online and hybrid experiences. O3: Synthesise a set of actionable insights, tools, concepts and models that can enable and support post-COVID19 recovery.