Dr Vivi Antonopoulou reflects on her six-month fellowship with Newham Council, exploring how Adult Social Care and Children's Services staff adapt to organisational change and service improvement.
Dr Vivi Antonopoulou shares reflections from her six-month fellowship, working with colleagues in Adult Social Care and Children's Services to understand how our workforce experiences and navigates organisational change and new ways of working.
For the past six months, as part of my UCL Public Policy London Local Authorities Fellowship, I have been working with the London Borough of Newham. My usual academic world—designing studies, reviewing evidence and writing papers—was replaced with meetings with policy officers, service managers, digital transformation leads, data specialists, procurement colleagues and HR teams.
At the centre of the fellowship was focus groups and interviews with frontline practitioners and managers across Adult Social Care and Children's Services. The overall aim was to understand how Council staff experience organisational change in practice: what helps people adopt new ways of working, what barriers they encounter, and what support enables change to succeed in complex service environments.
Partway through the fellowship, I was awarded a Public Policy Fellowship micro-grant, which provided additional funding to support collaboration with designers, illustrators and other specialists. This enabled us to explore new ways of translating research findings into practical tools and resources. By making research findings more accessible and engaging, this translation work aimed to strengthen the link between research, service improvement and resident outcomes, ensuring that insights from the study could support real-world change for both practitioners and Newham residents they serve.
What I take away is a deeper understanding of local government’s complexities and of the commitment and professional values of the people who work within it. I also leave with a clearer sense of what academic-policy partnership truly requires: sustained relationship, genuine mutual respect, and a willingness on both sides to work in partnership. Success depends on being able to speak each other’s language, operate at each other’s pace, and build something together that neither could have produced alone. More than any individual finding, that is the lesson of these six months.
Dr Vivi Antonopoulou is a Principal Research Fellow in behavioural science, currently based at the Centre for Behaviour Change, University College London.
