Five system challenges

We have learnt about system challenges over several years of working alongside clients who faced multiple disadvantage. The aspiration was to understand the types of barriers people facing multiple disadvantage experience when trying to get their support needs met by services and systems, and to use this learning to create change. 

Practitioners who supported Golden Key clients documented ‘blocks and barriers’ that they perceived to be preventing people from making changes in their lives. This work generated lots of examples. The programme worked to make sense of all this information and produced a list of fifty recurring issues. Further discussion between practitioners and Golden Key’s partnership board identified five overarching challenges. These five system challenges represent the most prevalent issues which have been observed across multiple parts of the system. 

The five challenges are: 

• Lack of appropriate options 

• Assessment and referral processes 

• Transitions 

• Shared accountability 

• Culture and mindset 

Each challenge can look different depending on the context in which it is occurring and the circumstances and needs of the people involved. Our experience is that people working within the system are already aware of these issues, but often find it difficult to identify what actions they could take to start addressing them. Our learning about the system has highlighted that these five system issues are complex challenges that need to be worked with rather than treated as ‘problems to be solved’. 

We have created a video that will provide you with an introduction to the challenges.  

We have also created a downloadable reflective tool that describes them in more detail and contains questions to help you reflect and identify actions you could begin to take to work with the challenges.