Helping Essex Fostering Service
The first step towards more transformational changes is working with experts, trusting them and taking a direct approach to making improvements.
On the first day of our project with Essex Council and their fostering team, Ben Unsworth and Nic Ward in the Essex Service Transformation team forwarded us an email from the fostering service manager saying, “our website is now hugely outdated and very likely impacting on our ability to attract and ultimately recruit new foster carers to foster for Essex”.
That sentence was the guiding principle for all of the work we did.
We learned pretty quickly that fostering is one of the many parts of the public sector where provision runs across both public and private sectors. Local authorities are responsible for finding foster carers for children. They can place them with foster carers registered with the local authority, or they can place them with foster carers registered via independent fostering agencies (IFAs). When there aren’t enough carers registered with the local authority, they have to use IFAs. So councils and IFAs are effectively in competition for foster carers to register with them.
Local authorities prefer to place children with foster carers who are fostering via the local authority because it’s better for children, foster carers and local authorities. Essex is rated an Outstanding care provider by Ofsted, and provides local training and local support for people fostering in Essex. But some IFAs make snazzy websites and promise the moon on a stick to foster carers - who are then sometimes let down. (You know when you search for ‘plumber south London’ and you find one actually in Manchester but with an SEO hacked footer full of postcodes nationwide? Some IFA websites are a bit like that.) Recent government research gives the statistical background on this increasing privatisation of children’s care.
Enough backstory. Onto the project.
Change a life by fostering
Essex wanted more foster carers registered with Essex Council - for all of the reasons outlined above. The website was one of the pieces of the puzzle.
Their old website was not great - it wasn’t responsive to work on mobile phones, content was poorly structured and accrued over many years of updates, and it wasn’t clear whether it was really for prospective foster carers or existing ones. We knew from conversations with the fostering service team that every week that went by with their old site in place potentially meant a lost opportunity to register more foster carers.
In our industry it’s now natural to start a new project with the words “we should do a discovery”. But we didn’t feel that this bit of work needed one. Instead we thought: publishing on the web in local government is a solved problem, so let’s run at it.
There were a few reasons why we felt it was a straightforward enough bit of work to avoid discovery:
- Other local authorities have improved their fostering sites before. Essex isn’t trying to compete with foster carers in Reading, Bradford, Kent or Portsmouth, because councils try to place children in care that is local. So we can learn from what other councils and regions do. We could build on some great work by other people to quickly get something better than the current site out there. On top of that, our collective experience of working on GOV.UK meant that we were comfortable recommending and building out content using patterns like the (D&AD award winning) Step-by-step.
- We had direct access to the fostering service team every week - people that work day in, day out with prospective and existing foster carers. They knew the answers we might have been looking for in a discovery.
- Any technology decisions were also solved pretty much from the off too, because lots of people have put the hard CMS work in too: Essex was halfway to rolling out LocalGov Drupal across the council. It made immediate sense to work with that rather than against it. LocalGov Drupal, decision made.
Of course, over time we learned about the things that weren’t solved problems. Publishing informational services in local government might well be a solved problem, but fostering isn’t exclusively an informational service.
It’s an area where the public sector is in a marketplace alongside private sector suppliers, where cost-per-acquisition matters, where competition is real and marketing campaigns are a crucial part of getting new foster carers into Essex’s orbit.
Russell’s now-decade-old blog post about what word to use for the people we’re designing for says: “But, fundamentally it comes down to choice, or lack of it. If people have no choice but to use your service they’re not a customer.” People deciding to foster with Essex have a choice whether to use the service or not. Government digital tooling largely assumes users don’t have a choice. Fostering is one of those provisions that falls into both camps.
Showing what’s at stake in fostering more clearly
We took screenshots of every page on the current site to get a view of the navigation structure and get to grips with the content. Using those screenshots we made a map of the current site structure. We copied every bit of existing content into a Google Doc. Then we prototyped a new structure, using a mix of professional instinct and other fostering site inspiration.
We knew that a lot of the content used language known by specialists but not by a general audience. So whenever we didn’t understand a word, we replaced it with something in plainer English. We wrote and designed content that was a lot clearer, more emotive about what’s at stake in foster care, and used less jargon. In week 4, we tested a prototype with the top two levels of site content updated. Getting to this in week 4 was made possibly by our writer, Rod, and our designer/researcher Sonia working closely together: in an FF team of four, we had experienced people, low communication overheads and high trust. We think that combination showed in the work.
The Essex team helped us find research participants from their Facebook community of people who were interested in fostering, but not committed. Testing confirmed to us that fostering needed to talk more directly to potential carers. The site needed to show the reality of fostering, how Essex could help new foster carers, and show them information relevant to them.
Fostering is about carers working together to support children and young people. It’s hard work. It’s also somewhat “invisible” - it’s hard for a potential foster carer to get a sense of it from the outside. We learned in research that it feels like the very first steps are scary, that taking the first step into enquiring means you’ll be committing there and then. So we made the call to action even more prominent - pick up the phone. And we made it clear that the first step is just a chat, nothing more.
Screenshot of the homepage we designed for Essex Fostering
Closing the gap between design and production
This project was all about moving from the first meeting to something in production as quickly as possible. We wanted to go straight to prototyping in code, and got access to Essex’s pre-production environment, so instead of running local versions of the site, we could play with the staging site to get an idea of the templates that existed in Drupal.
The project was, in many ways, a Trojan horse for LocalGov Drupal across Essex. We chose a subsite structure, knowing that attracting new foster carers was more of a campaign than the kind of transactional service that many of us with government backgrounds are used to.
But subsites hadn’t been used before at Essex, and some subsite components weren’t quite ready for production. Putting the effort into making those components ready for production meant that other Essex council services could benefit from subsites in the future, too.
Once we knew what kind of templates existed and what state they were in, we went back to Figma to build prototypes for testing. We wanted to show people content looking as close to the final result as possible, so we built page templates in Figma that reflected the changes we were suggesting to subsite templates.
Finally, with our first round of research findings under our belts, we went back to LocalGov Drupal to build out the pages and do further content iteration, as well as build out a set of recommendations to Essex’s CMS agency partner for how subsite navigation could be improved. Later, a team at Essex worked with people at Hammersmith & Fulham and Dumfries and Galloway councils to build those changes and put them back into the LocalGov Drupal core project. This is great: councils have enough of a funding crisis, and enough unit cost problems. Sharing is caring.
What if you said what you really think?
Throughout we worked with the fostering team with weekly meetings to show them what we’d done and to fact-check, hear their concerns and their stories. Sometimes we pushed them to stay true to what they knew and what they believed. It’s better for children, for local authorities and for foster carers to foster through local councils - so let’s say so. If you’re investing time, energy, effort and attention into making a new website, stand tall and say what you really think. We’re really proud that the site went live with these lines:
Your local council’s interest is perfectly aligned with yours: the child must always come first.
As privately-owned agencies, IFAs have shareholders and must balance service provision and the need to make a profit. But councils have no profit motive.
We stay utterly focused on children and carers.
Potential foster carers deserve to see the reality of what they’re getting into, and know how to find out more about what it might be like. And fostering teams in local authorities deserve the opportunity to talk to potential foster carers, rather than be passed over for an IFA because the IFA’s website is better.
Screenshot of the Why foster with Essex page of the site as it was originally launched
Over the last 10 years huge progress has been made on informational services in government, and through thousands of people’s hard work we have best practice to point at as well as common tooling, standards and playbooks. But there are services in the local community or local authority space that have a sales or campaigning need, not a transactional or informational one. There is definitely a need for new patterns and tooling to be developed and shared.
Fostering and other care services address real problems for real people every day. They’re also very complex because a lot is at stake: improving outcomes, duty of care, reporting and compliance, and doing it all with constrained budgets and in competition with the private sector. Fostering really matters.