After the whirlwind of the past month, I’m just now reviewing my notes from the Co-operative Education in Wales event run by the IWA on 28th June. In particular I wrote down this quote from the fantastic Dave Bolton, Chief Executive of the Schools Co-operative Society, talking about the co-operative, participative way of running a school:
“People say, ‘good schools do it anyway’. And it’s true, but with the co-operative model you say what you’re going to do, and then you do it. And then you can pass on the model.”
The parallel with co-production stood out for me. Many organisations and groups are already “doing co-production”, and have done for years, often without necessarily calling it ‘co-production’ – it can be the natural way of operating when you are working closely with people. But the point is that having a co-production framework means that it can be adopted by a whole range of other organisations that might originally had different ways of operating.
And this is what is important: to build a model, to learn from it, and to pass on those learnings.
Co-production Wales 