How we worked together to reduce child poverty
and support parent-baby relationships
in Liverpool.

The Model for Improvement template specifies a high level aim of the Improvement Collaborative. It’s the “North Star” that we will navigate towards together.

  • Identifying the areas or issues that could make or break our shared aim.
  • Asking how we know that we were achieving our aim/ addressing our issues. (Notice anything here that we could all measure as evidence of our progress)
  • Collecting ideas (and theories, hunches or key changes) that might help us to make the improvements that we seek, including:
    • our level of certainty that this will work
    • our level of agreement that this is the right thing to do

Supporting mother and baby relationships

Driver/ Model for Improvement Template: Establishing shared purpose


“For Citizens Advice to become safely and effectively embedded in early years and Early Help Pathways.”

Plan, Do, Study Act (PDSA) cycles

If we have high certainty and high agreement, we might simply implement our idea or key change within our system.

Where either certainty and/ or agreement are low, we can ask for volunteers to test this for us and report back to the collaborative.

PDSA cycles encourage small scale testing of ideas before wide scale implementation. They help knowledge and confidence to grow and provide an evidence base to support roll-out across the collaborative.

  • Plan – Who? What? Where? When?
  • Do – carry out the plan, collect the data and any other observations
  • Study – what was learned? Any evidence of progress?
  • Act – what changes are to be made? Where next?

Learning Exchanges

Provide space and time to allow and encourage collaborative members to learn from each other: share problems and ideas, solutions, successes and failures.

Expect this to take time, trust that connections initially encouraged through planned activities and discussions will become stronger over time and allow space within your collaborative agenda for people to connect with each other.

(You will know this is happening when you suggest a group task / focus of conversation and the group uses this time to address the issues most important to them…)

Good news stories – telling the story of our positive progress

Celebrate as a community, applaud good news (large and small) and provide a space for people to share news of progress within and across the room.

Using data – showing people how far we have progressed together

Identifying and collecting data helps us see how far we have travelled.

Expect it to take time to identify the key measure(s) – and create systems to reliably collect and report the data.

Identify the reporting period (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly) that helps the collaborative to understand their progress and identify and explain their data patterns.

Run charts offer a simple, effective and visual way to show the results:

They can also be used to show progress for any “groups” within the collaborative, supporting comparison that might lead to shared learning or motivation to drive further improvement.

Community of practice

For example, one such improvement that came from the workshops was ‘a non-English-speaking clinic/ department’ of midwives in Liverpool, which didn’t previously have any non-English advice services on site. Citizens Advice Liverpool now has an employee based there, to provide advice in other languages than English.