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Contents
  1. Category A, Connecting and brokering
Connecting and brokering

Discipline 2. Local area and patch-based coordinators

A woman in her sixties with a walking cane and a folded street map, walking past a garden gate with a milk bottle on the step.

Maturity of support

  • 4Codification
  • 3Institutions
  • 3Training
  • 4Communities
  • 3Academia
  • 3.4Overall, mean of the five

Area-based coordinators are a well-codified discipline supported by three decades of evidence, a well-established framework, and an active professional network. The Local Area Coordinator model was first developed in Western Australia in the late 1980s and brought to the UK via Ralph Broad’s Inclusive Neighbourhoods. The model embeds a coordinator in a defined community of c.8-10,000 people to help residents develop their own vision of a good life, build networks, and limit unnecessary dependence on public services.

The difference between area-focused coordinators and peer connectors is that the latter treat their unit as a person: someone comes for help, or is referred. A local area, or patch-based, coordinator’s unit of work is a place. They hold a defined geography and are, in a loose sense, responsible for that place, a little like a park ranger. Posts sit mainly within local government or its commissioned partners, established through site agreements. This gives the discipline a stability that most of the other disciplines in this report lack, but also ties its fortunes closely to the fortunes of local authority budgets.

Examples

Assessing the supporting architecture

The supporting architecture is among the most strong and coherent we found. There are documented role profiles, supervision standards and design principles, maintained by the Local Area Coordination Network. Practitioners can access induction support and regional gatherings.

There are credible evaluation studies, including social return on investment analyses by Kingfishers for Thurrock (2015) and Derby (2016), suggesting around £4 of social value for every £1 invested. There is also peer-reviewed work by Bainbridge and Lunt at the University of York, drawing on their evaluation of City of York Council’s programme, and an independent evaluation of the Suffolk pilot by Reinhardt and Chatsiou at the University of Essex. Because the discipline has an international footprint, it may be more recognised and resilient than a purely domestic discipline.

Two gaps in support stand out. There is no enduring body charged with supporting the discipline, while the most relevant training is not recognised as a regulated qualification, and is not widely available through universities or further education colleges. This means a person can be a highly competent Local Area Coordinator but struggle to demonstrate their competence or transfer their skills into a neighbouring area of work.