As we recognise Co-production Week 2026, the imperative to reshape how social care is understood, researched, and delivered has never been more urgent. At the Centre for Care, co-production is not an add-on or a checkbox exercise for our research teams; it is our foundational methodology. By elevating lived experience to the status of expert knowledge, we are generating insights that are academically rigorous and deeply rooted in the realities of daily life.
To show how this way of working shapes our research, we are spotlighting some of our recent work: our scoping project on Social Care Charging and our Transitions that Matter commentary series.
The Social Care Charging Project
The reality of social care in England is that hundreds of thousands of disabled people must pay out of their own limited incomes to ensure they receive the care and support they require to live. This leaves many scraping by on the Minimum Income Guarantee (money set aside for individuals by the Local Authority when carrying out a financial assessment, intended to ensure that people keep a level of income that covers their living costs), pushing individuals into compounding cycles of debt, poverty, and isolation. Despite its profound impact, the mechanism of social care charging remains poorly understood by many, lacking national standardisation and obscured by localised, opaque assessment frameworks.
When the Centre for Care decided to investigate this crisis, the idea came directly from conversations with our Centre for Care Community Associates – individuals who navigate social care systems daily. The project was co-produced by Professor Catherine Needham, Sam Teo and Community Associates Anne Pridmore and Eleni Chambers, who brought the indispensable, nuanced expertise of navigating these financial assessments firsthand.
Through this collaborative design, the team exposed how local variations in defining “Disability Related Expenditure” create an unjust lottery, where challenging an incorrect charge is extremely difficult without independent advocacy. The co-productive process itself yielded important mutual learning, with the academics gaining insight into an often-overlooked perspective of social care policy. For our Community Associates, the project was a vital vehicle for systemic disruption. As Eleni observed, “I hear more and more nowadays of people refusing care, simply because they can’t afford the high charges that are imposed on them. When you add in other factors such as the lack of information, complexity of the system and the lack of support and advocacy available to help people, it’s no wonder that people just give up the battle”. By co-producing this research, we ensured that the findings and recommendations of our subsequent Working Paper, released in June 2026, speak with an authority that data alone could not achieve.
Amplifying Diverse Voices: The ‘Transitions that Matter’ Commentary Series
A similarly transformative approach defines our work on care trajectories, specifically through our Transitions that Matter project and its accompanying commentary series. Traditionally, the word ‘transition’ in social care policy very often refers to a young person moving from children’s services into adult social care. While this milestone is undeniably crucial, limiting the definition ignores the fluid reality of human lives.
In partnership with the Centre for Care Voice Forum (now our Community Associates) and the University of Birmingham Lived Experience Panel, this co-produced series of articles explored this definition and expanded how we consider transitions in social care, allowing us to conceptualise transitions as any significant life change that disabled people, older people and carers navigate across their entire life course.
The breadth of transitions identified by our co-researchers is staggering: it spanned from moving a physical care package or undergoing a stressful Direct Payments review, to navigating the menopause and coping with bereavement.
The authors of the series highlight structural failures that traditional research frameworks frequently miss. For instance, a guest commentary by Robert Punton introduced the vital concept of “transitioning into invisibility”. Writing from his perspective as a disabled person moving from middle to old age, Robert articulated a profound systemic truth: as individuals age and their needs fluctuate, society shifts its perception of them from an asset to a structural burden.
Without co-production, such vital experiences would remain sidelined. Instead, through the commentary series, these insights have directly informed a Working Paper and a Report, ensuring that when we make recommendations for “transition-friendly” policies, we are advocating for changes that truly matter to the people living them.
Why we updated our co-production payment rates (and what it means): a shared reflection
This short commentary takes the form of a dialogue, stemming from conversations between citizen leader Robert Walker, CEO of the patient and public involvement (PPI) organisation Changes Plus, and Senior Research Fellow, PJ Annand, co-investigator of the Centre for Care.
The True Value of Co-production
What the Social Care Charging project and the Transitions that Matter series demonstrate is that co-production fundamentally alters our research outputs because it revolutionises the inputs. It acknowledges that a care ecosystem is a complex, adaptive web of relationships. True understanding cannot be achieved by studying parts of the system in isolation; it requires engaging with the supportive networks of family, friends, and advocates who move with individuals through their lives.
As we look ahead through Co-production Week 2026 and beyond, the Centre for Care remains steadfast in this approach. We are proving that when you share power, respect diverse forms of expertise, and build research around the lived realities of care, you don’t just produce better research outcomes. You build the foundations for a fairer, more compassionate, and genuinely equitable social care system.
