The Learning and Enquiry theme in PIEs 2 focusses on how - and what - services and their staff think about the service itself.

*NB: this page is an excerpt from 'The Book of PIE', one of the 'Other writings' : HERE

Sector engagement

As this theme is really about the culture of the organisation itself, rather than the specific services it provides, some have used the term ‘a learning organisation’.

But for some services, this organisational culture of learning and enquiry also extends beyond their own service, to include working with others – local forums (or indeed researchers) – to better understand the needs of the area, the changes, the pressures, and how the service fits in with others in the pathway – or struggles to. Here it may even cross over into providing explicit training, or consultancy and supervision.

For this kind of reaching out we have coined the phrase ‘sector engagement’; and in the further reading section, we have several examples of services that have been particularly pro-active in engaging not just clients, but other professionals, and even the wider pubic.

At which point, as we suggested earlier, this kind of active engagement is in a position to help to tackle more systemic issues – and to identify areas where the work of the services may be held back by them. So this area, the service environment and the spaces of opportunity, is where we may turn next.

At some point, though, the boundary between sharing learning from practice in conversations and contributing to a still wider picture starts to blur. When these discussions are written up and published, we are at the edge of a further area - evidence-generating practice. Where services invite researchers in to explore their work, we are clearly entering this territory.