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Category D: Seeing and reflecting

These disciplines produce knowledge and meaning about a place, working from within the community who live there. They matter for civic renewal because a community that cannot describe itself will be described by others, often in a language of deficits, and sometimes to its disadvantage. It also matters because imagining a different future depends to a degree on being able to articulate a story about the present.

08 Lived-experience and peer researchers · 09 Cultural, creative and heritage practitioners

  4. Category D, Seeing and reflecting
Seeing and reflecting

Discipline 8. Lived-experience and peer researchers

A stocky man in his thirties with a prosthetic leg sitting on a bench with a recorder and an open notebook.

Maturity of support

  • 3Codification
  • 3Institutions
  • 2Training
  • 2Communities
  • 3Academia
  • 2.6Overall, mean of the five

In this work, lived experience is used deliberately as an aide to research and inquiry. It is supported by competency frameworks and principles of mutuality and reciprocity, such as the UK Standards for Public Involvement and the NIHR’s payment guidance – ensuring, for example, that people with lived experience are well-supported and properly compensated. This discipline is especially mature in mental health, and is also prominent in homelessness, substance-use recovery, and increasingly in social care through experts-by-experience.

Peer researchers work in a wide range of contexts, and this is not only a civil society activity. Peer researchers work extensively on public sector research agendas – evaluating services, shaping commissioning, sitting on research advisory groups in the NHS and in local authorities – and also work in third sector research and advocacy. The methods are similar although the skills required to apply them in different contexts will vary.

Examples

Assessing the supporting architecture

Support for this work is mature in mental health, but less so elsewhere. In mental health, there is a national Competence Framework for Mental Health Peer Support Workers, developed by the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, a curriculum and a Level 3 Certificate in Peer Support Work offered by ImROC, values frameworks from survivor-led organisations, including NSUN’s 4Pi National Involvement Standards and Shaping Our Lives’ principles, and a strong evidence base including a Cochrane review of consumer-providers in statutory mental health services. In homelessness and substance-use recovery support is more nascent, with practitioner accreditation attached to particular models, such as Mayday Trust’s PTS qualification, accredited by Coventry University, and Groundswell’s peer research training. In social care there are frameworks for involving people, such as Think Local Act Personal’s Making It Real and SCIE’s co-production guidance but with less focus on peer researchers. There is much less support in criminal justice, asylum and unpaid care.

Communities of practice and training are the two lowest-scoring dimensions of support for this discipline, which means practitioners are often left without practical support. There is also no nationally regulated qualification. Formal qualifications, and their associated professionalisation, need to be considered carefully. Peer research is a skilled role, and practitioners are likely to benefit from some training, for example in peer research methods, ethics and how to handle difficult conversations. However, there can also be downsides to formal training if it creates barriers between peer researchers and the communities they are part of. Peer researchers we spoke to did not feel they needed credentials; what they wanted was to be paid properly, supported when the work opened up difficult feelings, and to be treated with respect, as researchers rather than as data. The important difference here might be between formal credentials on the one hand, and training and skills development opportunities on the other.