Introduction

In the last chapter, we learned how service users and others emphasised the importance of service user and worker involvement to achieve change. They saw making change as the primary purpose of user involvement and getting involved. The focus of this, the final chapter, is change itself and what change will be needed if person-centred support is to be established as the routine and mainstream way in which services seek to meet people's rights and needs.

This whole book is about making change. It comes at a time when there is widespread recognition that there must be reform in how people are supported in our society. We see the book as part of a continuing process of trying to bring about change. The project it draws on was concerned to help make change and to develop evidence and learning about how to do this most effectively. The book started by highlighting the current view, both among government and public, that there needed to be change in social care.

This was framed officially in terms of a move to ‘personalisation’. Yet even during the course of the year in which this watershed change in policy direction was embarked upon, 2008, a shift emerged from purposeful ministerial statements like ‘the issue is not if, but how’, to increasingly questioning and cautious views from previously enthusiastic experts and commentators (Brindle, 2008). The government of the time also did not wait for the findings to be available from the research it had itself commissioned on individual budgets before making the massive move to personalisation from traditional social care services. As a result expectations for moves to personalisation and self-directed support, seemed to be changing within a year, from ‘transformation’ (the government's term), to continued progress where there was grassroots commitment, but limited progress beyond this (Glasby and Littlechild, 2009).

We made clear early on in this book, the irony that while there is currently a strong emphasis on the need for change in social care, it is a field where there has been constant change for years now.