As we’ve entered Coproduction Week, I’ve found myself reflecting on a question I was asked recently: “What does co-production actually mean?” 

It’s a question I’ve answered many times throughout my career, but lately I’ve become increasingly aware that the answer isn’t as straightforward as it seems. 

In social care, we’ve created a fairly established picture of what “good” coproduction looks like. We often think about people with lived experience sitting on forums, joining working groups, helping shape policies or contributing to organisational decisions. 

Don’t get me wrong, all of those things matter. 

But I wonder whether, sometimes, our understanding of coproduction has become too narrow. In fact, I’ve started putting the word “coproduction” in inverted commas. 

Not because I don’t believe in it, but because I think the assumptions that now sit behind the word can get in the way of what we’re really trying to achieve. 

When I talk about coproduction, I increasingly find myself using a different phrase: 

Working together

In theory, the two phrases mean the same thing, but they create very different pictures in our minds. 

When people hear “coproduction”, they often imagine a process, a project, a  meeting, or a consultation exercise. 

When people hear “working together”, they tend to think about relationships, partnership, and shared purpose. People bringing their different experiences, strengths, skills and perspectives to solve problems together. That feels much closer to what we’re trying to achieve. 

Seeing people differently 

One of the biggest risks in social care is that we start to see people primarily through a label. A person with a learning disability. A family member. A support worker. A manager. A trustee. 

Each of those identities matters, but none of them tells us everything about a person, and we all tend to identify with many different labels. 

When we work together well, we don’t invite people into conversations simply because of a label they hold. We invite people because they have something valuable to contribute. This can come from lived experience of drawing on support, professional expertise, or even from being a family member or friend. 

People aren’t just in the room because they tick a category  

The goal is to bring together the people whose experiences, skills, passions and perspectives can help us make better decisions. 

That includes people who draw on support because their voices and experiences are essential to decisions that affect their lives. 

True co-production is about more than representation – it is about recognising that everyone has something to contribute. 

Too often, organisations talk about coproduction when what they really mean is inviting people into structures that were designed without them. 

We ask people to join our meetings, comment on our documents, respond to our agendas. We want them to fit into systems that were built by a relatively small group of people who historically held most of the power. 

Those efforts are often well intentioned, but they don’t necessarily change the balance of power. The big challenge is to ask whether the structures themselves need to be redesigned so that everyone can genuinely participate. 

Why this matters now 

Through our Big Plan, United Response has committed to becoming the most coproduced charity in the UK. 

The more I’ve reflected on that ambition, the more I’ve found myself thinking about what sits beneath it. Because for me, this isn’t ultimately just about forums, policies or consultation exercises – it’s about how we work together. 

It’s about creating a culture where people are recognised for their strengths, experiences and contributions rather than the labels they carry. Where lived experience is valued alongside professional expertise, and decisions are shaped with the people most affected by them, not simply for them. Where we remain curious enough to challenge assumptions about who holds knowledge, who holds expertise and who gets to influence the future. 

Perhaps that’s what excites me most about this ambition. Not that it gives us all the answers, but that it encourages us to keep asking better questions and be open to doing things differently. 

Because coproduction isn’t something we do. It’s the way we work, how we learn, and how we’ll build the kind of organisation we want to become. 

As a proud member of the Social Care Futures movement, United Response shares a vision of a future where we can all live in the place we call home, with the people and things we love, in communities where we look out for one another. 

That vision challenges us to think differently about support, power, participation and belonging. 

Our partnership with Gloriously Ordinary Lives is helping us explore these ideas more deeply, and one of the biggest things we are learning is that language matters. The words we use shape how we think, and how we think shapes how we act. Which in turn shapes the lives and opportunities people experience as their reality. 

If we want to change practice, we need to become conscious of the language that reflects and reinforces it. Because language doesn’t simply describe the world we live in – it helps create the world that becomes possible. 

Perhaps that’s why I’m spending less time worrying about the definition of coproduction and more time thinking about what it really means to work together. 

After all, that’s what we’re trying to build. Not better consultation or better processes, but a future shaped by all of us, together.