A project within ARC EoE’s Social Care Research Development Initiative, ASCENT programme, has been shortlisted for the Practitioner-Led Research Award at this year’s Social Worker of the Year Awards. Led by the Practice Standards and Quality Team at Cambridgeshire County Council, the project explored the views of people with lived experience on service provision.
Quality assurance within Adult Social Care is essential for understanding and improving the quality of practice. It helps ensure safe, compassionate and person-centred support while holding local authorities accountable. Traditionally, this has involved reviewing case records, audit findings and performance data. However, these measures cannot fully tell us what it feels like for a person with lived experience of Adult Social Care services to receive support from them.
To address this, ARC East of England’s ASCENT programme seed-funded a project at Cambridgeshire County Council between December 2025 and March 2026. Its aim was to better understand the views of people with lived experience of Adult Social Care and create a framework for embedding their perspectives and experiences into quality assurance and auditing activities.
Ali Keclik, Head of Quality Assurance and Practice Standards at Cambridgeshire County Council, shares the background to the project: "We wanted to understand what good support looks like from people’s perspective, whether they felt listened to, and what difference interventions made to their lives.
We explored what people would want to feedback on, how to encourage them to participate, and how we could develop a process that felt accessible, meaningful and influential. This project gave us the opportunity to explore what matters most to people when reflecting on their experiences of Adult Social Care and how their voices can play a more meaningful role in shaping quality assurance activity.
Ali Keclik
Head of Quality Assurance and Practice Standards, Cambridgeshire County Council
The project worked with people with lived experience from the start to shape the co-design process, placing lived experience at the heart of understanding, measuring and improving quality. Through in-person workshops with participants, the project highlighted the importance of gathering feedback promptly, while experiences are still fresh, and ensuring that individuals feel heard and understood, with clear communication about how their feedback will be used to drive improvements. They also stressed the importance of offering a range of ways to share their views, including face-to-face conversations, digital tools, written feedback, and support from carers or advocates where needed.
This project shows the value of working alongside people, not simply as participants, but as equal partners in shaping what good quality looks like. For me, that is what great social work is all about: learning with people, not just about them, and making sure their experiences directly influence the services we provide.
Fran Marshall
Service Director of Quality Assurance, Practice and Safeguarding and Principal Social Worker for Adults Social Care, Cambridgeshire County Council
[Continued] If we are truly committed to being person-centred, the voices of people who use our services must be at the heart of how we learn, improve and shape support for the future.
Fran Marshall
Service Director of Quality Assurance, Practice and Safeguarding and Principal Social Worker for Adults Social Care, Cambridgeshire County Council
The ARC East of England provided additional support through Dr Louise Prothero, ASCENT Researcher-in-Residence at Cambridgeshire County Council and Anglia Ruskin University. Louise provided advice and expertise in preparing the funding application and worked with the Practice Standards and Quality Team to develop their understanding of the key principles and practices involved in planning and delivering the project. Louise worked alongside the project team, including Ali Keclik, Head of Quality Assurance and Practice Standards at Cambridgeshire County Council, who led the project and oversaw its design and delivery.
This was an important project, so often individuals’ experiences and voices get lost within systems and organisations, and this work brought them back to the fore. Ali and the team were passionate about this project and worked hard to plan and deliver the workshops.
Dr Louise Prothero
ASCENT Researcher-in-Resident, NIHR ARC East of England and Anglia Ruskin University
ASCENT is an infrastructure programme led by ARC East of England that supports the development of research capacity in adult and children's social care across the East of England. Through initiatives including Research-in-Residence placements and seed funding, the programme helps social care staff and practitioners develop the skills needed to conduct research and apply evidence in practice. Between 2024 and 2026, 10 social care professionals from a range of organisations and sectors received ASCENT seed funding. The seed funding will continue within the next five year and will be launched annually.
We are excited that the team is shortlisted for the Practitioner-Led Research Award. We are also pleased that the ASCENT Programme supported the project through both funding and research expertise. This recognition highlights the value of practitioner-led research and the collaboration between research and practice in driving evidence-informed practice.
Dr Lida Efstathopoulou
ASCENT Programme Coordinator, NIHR ARC East of England
The project has already influenced the council’s approach to quality assurance. It has strengthened skills and confidence within the team in co-production and participatory approaches, ensuring that the voices of people who use services play an important role in shaping future, meaningful improvements. Beyond Cambridgeshire, the project provides a practical example of how local authorities can work alongside people with lived experience to design quality assurance systems that are more responsive, inclusive and person-centred.
The findings are currently being used to develop and test a co-produced feedback approach within the quality assurance team. The team will share the findings widely across the organisation and through regional and national quality assurance networks, helping others consider how lived experience can be embedded within assurance and improvement activities. The project has the potential to support more person-centred practice by ensuring that improvement activities are shaped by the experiences of people receiving support.
We are proud of the collaboration achieved through the ARC EoE Researcher-in-Residence scheme and it perfectly meets our ambition at the Health and Care Research Centre at ARU to support and develop an organisational culture where research is embedded and supports improvement. By having the project shortlisted for Social Worker of the Year Awards, it has created visibility for the important work.
Sally Fowler Davis
Director of Health and Care Research Centre, Anglia Ruskin University
Sally Fowler Davis, Director of the Health and Care Research Centre at Anglia Ruskin University, continues: "The recognition showcases how audit and research are essentially about working in partnership with public contributors."
Celebrating their 20th year, the Social Worker of the Year Awards is the only major national awards event for social work in England. The Practitioner-Led Research Award recognises local authorities and partner organisations across the social care sector to lead research or build a research culture. The awards will be taking place in October 2026.