Co-design: Home Educators Fund with Culham St Gabriel's
In the fall of 2023, TSIP embarked on an exciting journey with Culham St Gabriel’s, All Saints and St Peter's Saltley Trust, to explore how participatory approaches to funding can lead to more innovative approaches in religious education. Commissioned to co-design a fund specifically for home educators in the West Midlands, the aim was to enhance the practice of religions and worldviews education for their children. As a result of this work, the bespoke Religion and Worldviews Home Educators’ Fund was created, and launched this Autumn 2024.
Why did we do it?
Traditional educational funding schemes often overlook home educators, who form a growing and diverse community with distinct needs. Despite their importance, home educators rarely receive tailored financial support to enhance learning, particularly in specialised subjects like religious education. By creating a fund specifically for elective home education (EHE), we aimed to address this gap, recognising the potential for enriched educational experiences for children learning outside of formal school settings.
Moreover, this pilot project marked a significant innovation within the UK funding landscape, as it was the first of its kind to focus on participatory approaches in this context. Our objective was not only to provide resources but to pioneer a model of funding that prioritises collaboration, adaptability, and community input. By doing so, we hoped to develop a template for participatory funding that could be tested and refined alongside other grant-making efforts, potentially serving as a model for other funders.
How did we do it?
TSIP collaborated closely with key stakeholders and home educators in the West Midlands – from the initial concept stage through to the community co-designed pilot. This journey comprised three main steps:
Community engagement
Co-design process
Development of the prototype fund
Our community engagement was guided by desk research and interviews with academics and educators in the EHE space which informed our outreach of target communities for co-design sessions. Facilitating effective co-design sessions for this work required creating safe and creative spaces for home educators to share their insights and contribute to the fund’s development and design. Once they were completed, our analysis of the co-design sessions helped us finalise the fund’s focus, target audience, and the design of the application questionnaire.
Our collaborative approach ensured that the fund aligned with the needs and preferences of home educators, rather than imposing pre-existing models. This engagement deepened our understanding of the barriers home educators face and the challenges the fund might encounter in reaching them. For instance, we found accessibility and transparency emerge as recurring themes. To address these challenges, TSIP recommended simplifying the application process with clearer language, creating two different streams of funding to match home educators needs, and establishing a community panel to embed the voices of those directly impacted by the funding on decision making as well as provide support to potential applicants.
What did we learn?
This project underscored the critical role of flexibility, trust, and mutual understanding in the co-design process as essential foundations for fostering innovative thinking. One key area for improvement is dedicating more time and resources to early community engagement, ensuring a more diverse range of voices and experiences are represented from the start. However, the project demonstrated the profound value of participatory approaches to funding, revealing unique insights that can only emerge through genuine community collaboration as working with our co-design participants showed. It also emphasised the need for agility and responsiveness to community feedback. Future initiatives can build on this by prioritising inclusivity and transparency from the outset, ensuring that the solutions designed not only reflect but also effectively serve the communities they are intended to benefit.
TESTIMONIAL
"It was a pleasure to work with the TSIP team. They enabled us to think differently about grant making, helping us to think creatively through the process of co-constructing a fund in a new context. Their insights were often challenging, and ensured we considered a range of perspectives and approached grant making as inclusively as possible. As well as equipping us to set up a new fund, many of the insights gained have impacted on our other grant making practices." - CEO, Culham St Gabriel's Trust, Dr Kathryn Wright.
The clients have mentioned that by taking part in the process of co-design they have felt as though ‘anything is possible... we just need to find different ways to do things that makes engagement possible’ - During our project close meeting