The cost of living crisis is having a huge impact on people across Wales, with record-making numbers of people forced to make difficult decisions because they don’t have enough money to live on (Citizens Advice Cymru cost of living dashboard September 2023). 

Despite this, there are lots of people who aren’t claiming the benefits or grants that they are entitled to, or accessing the support services that are available. 
 
We’ve been working with local authorities and Welsh Government to test a new way of co-designing content that would: 

  • make cost of living content easier to understand and more accessible 

  • reduce duplication of effort 

  • improve the way that we develop bilingual content 

So far, we’ve used this co-design approach to review the School Essentials Grant and Free School Meals content on local authority websites to help make it easier for low-income families with children to learn about and apply for the grants and support available.

Understanding the problem 

It might sound obvious, but properly understanding a problem is essential to solving it - yet this is often the bit that can often get missed or rushed.  
 
We spent time with colleagues across the public and not-for-profit sector in Wales, and with users, to explore why people might not claim benefits or access support when they needed it. We found that: 

  • people aren’t aware of the benefits or cost of living support available to them 

  • delivery of services can be inconsistent and inaccessible 

  • services aren’t designed in a user-centred way 

  • data isn’t shared effectively between services or organisations 

  • guidance and eligibility criteria can be complicated and confusing 

Taken all at once, solving this feels like an impossible task. But breaking it down into smaller parts makes it more manageable. We decided to look at how we could help to improve bilingual content around benefits and cost of living support to make it easier for people to understand what they are entitled to and how they can access it.

Working in sprints

Once we’d identified the topics we wanted to tackle first, we phased the work into three sprints to be delivered by a multidisciplinary team. Sprints are a feature of Agile project management and provide a set period in which to deliver smaller chunks of work. Our sprints looked like this:  

Sprint 1: Learn and plan 

We brought the team together to explore the problem area in more depth, identifying the key user groups and their needs, engaging with subject matter experts and planning the user testing.  

Sprint 2: Develop and test  

Our content designer worked with colleagues in Welsh Government and a translator to develop the new content using trio-writing so that the Welsh language was an integral part of the content design process. 

We then added the content to a prototype so that we could carry out usability testing, speaking to users to make sure that the content meets their needs and getting feedback for improvements. 

Sprint 3: Refine and share 

We refined the content based on the feedback from users and subject matter experts, trying to get the right balance between accuracy and user-friendliness. We then shared this with local authorities so that they could publish it on their websites. 

We started with the School Essentials Grant content and then replicated the process for Free School Meals, tweaking our approach and ways of working as we went based on learning and feedback.

What users told us  

We spoke to 7 people who were users of Free School Meals services from a range of local authorities. This included 4 participants who used Welsh as a first language and 2 who could test the content on a mobile device. They told us that: 

  • they don’t use council websites to access information on Free School Meals – instead, they received information through their child’s school email, newsletter or school app notifications 

  • council websites aren’t very user friendly or engaging 

  • there’s some confusion about the difference between Universal and Eligible Free School Meals 

  • some people feel concerned about the stigma attached to receiving Free School Meals 

  • even first-language Welsh speakers aren’t familiar with the Welsh names of services – this is something that School Essentials Grant content users also told us during usability testing 

  • parents on benefits are not aware of or checking what other support they may be eligible for 

However, feedback on the new content itself was generally positive, with comments such as: 

“
“It’s easy to understand and pretty self-explanatory”.

“This information gets to the point quicker than council information and explains it better”.

We used this feedback to further improve the new content, which you can find in our Free School Meals toolkit. We also shared the learning with Welsh Government to help inform the continuous improvement of services.

Lessons learned 

Policy can be complicated, and it’s not always easy to communicate it in a user-friendly way. Involving experts and users right from the beginning, ideally from the point at which the policy is developed, really helps.  

Getting the whole team involved from the beginning creates a more supportive, productive environment and time isn’t wasted with handoffs. It also gives people the opportunity to learn from each other and gain new experiences. 

Working with a wide range of different stakeholders can be messy. It’s important to make sure that everyone understands what you’re doing and why, and that you’ve got the right people on board. Having someone from our communications team as part of the delivery team has really helped us with this, and we’ve learned a huge amount that we can take forward to the next piece of work. 

In the future, we would try to test the existing content with users before making any changes as a baseline to measure improvement against. 

What’s next?  

We’re speaking to local authorities to find out more about the challenges them and their users are facing around the cost of living, and to understand how we can support a more user-centred approach to ensuring that users are aware of and can access the support available to them. 

If you’re from a local authority in Wales and are interested in working with us, email ed.cann@digitalpublicservices.gov.wales