Here’s how you make ambitious public policy change happen: service design

Change is hard. Making brave, ambitious change within the complexities of government –– that's even harder.

But at the Service Design in Government Conference, Astrid Van Waveren (GAIN’s Head of UX and Insights) will show us how to turn big policy ideas into real differences that citizens can feel. 

The secret is service design. It’s how you get clarity when you have a complicated system of products. Service designers work at scale across an entire service to drive large, co-ordinated change

Ahead of her talk, Astrid’s shared the details about the service design work GAIN’s doing with the Department for Education (DfE) that she’s going to present on stage.  

For us, it's the perfect example of how service design works alongside strategic policy making to drive big impact

The goal: the most dramatic change to apprenticeships in a decade

Astrid will be presenting at the conference with DfE Apprenticeship service’s  Jess Gough (Head of Digital) and James Dotti (Senior Service Designer). 

There are 250,000 apprenticeships started in England every year. The apprenticeship service is the important digital infrastructure behind each one

It handles apprenticeship applications, learner registrations and government payments. These are important things that can't ever go wrong

But with the creation of Skills England, the government has announced bold new plans to redefine how technical education works in England. Shorter and more flexible apprenticeships will help quickly fill skill gaps in the economy.

That’s why DfE has been working with GAIN Experience to make their digital services ready to support this new educational environment. And if the digital services aren’t ready in time, the new policies can’t go live. 

Our priority? Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. 

With their bird’s eye view, service designers are the best-placed people to explain how digital services fit together. We work so policy makers understand the crucial technical networks that power England’s education system.  

And when policy and digital are on the same page? That’s when the magic happens.  

We prioritise impact. We let policymakers see what can be changed now, bringing ambitions to life fast. Meanwhile, designers can understand policy’s biggest ideas and start creating solutions that make them happen.  

How to work in ambiguity 

As government design experts, we know that policymaking is a process.  

Democracy means debate. It’s normal for it to take time for final decisions to be reached in Westminster. 

But we’ve got the frameworks, tools and methods to get ahead, even if the way forward isn’t fully defined yet. 

One technique Astrid used was to make a ‘decision snapshot’. She asked: What are the most likely decisions? How would we implement them? This gave clarity to uncertainty. It let DfE get started and begin technical sizing, before the way ahead was clear. 

Organising delivery to hit deadlines 

DfE has multiple agile delivery teams working in parallel to improve and iterate. 

But to deliver change at scale, you need to co-ordinate. And service designers can see which parts of a service need change. 

Astrid, James and Jess created customised heatmaps to show which parts of the journey needed the most work. This let teams plan their work and hit policy-driven deadlines.  

Doing more with less 

The talk at Service Design in Government is called ‘Policy design at pace’.  

The title’s a reminder that it’s more important than ever to deliver with efficiency. And service design is the tool for making big change happen.