The Quiet Work That Makes Public Service Reform Possible

This month’s Britain Renewed 2025 Conference, supported by the Growth and Reform Network, saw the launch of the Cabinet Office’s new Test, Learn and Grow Community. Announced by Josh Simons MP in his keynote speech, this network has been set up to bring together people across the public sector and civil society who want to apply a test and learn approach and be part of a movement behind more collaborative, place-based, learning-oriented public service reform.

As this community begins to take form, it is worth asking what genuinely helps capability for reform develop. Not the world imagined in strategy documents, but the one public servants inhabit every day, where teams are stretched, trade-offs are constant and services must continue running while change is attempted. Across networks and communities of practice, including the Growth and Reform Network, convened with Metro Dynamics and The Future Governance Forum, similar patterns appear. People make progress when they can be honest about what is and is not working, when they can test ideas at a manageable scale and when they can learn from peers facing different pressures.

The conversations at Britain Renewed 2025 were well placed for this moment. They focused on what national, regional, and local partners across the system are already doing to move things forward under demanding conditions, grounded in practical realities rather than abstract visions. It was a reminder that meaningful reform rarely comes from a single initiative. More often it emerges from a loose coalition of places, institutions and networks that choose to learn together and share what they are seeing. Taken together, both the conversations at the event, and my experience of running networks of places in the Growth and Reform Network and its predecessor, the Inclusive Growth Network, point to a few key principles:

Shared purpose needs shared language

A recurring challenge in cross-system work is that people often use the same words while meaning different things. Terms such as reform, outcomes and systems are shaped by institutional histories and professional experience. Without some shared understanding, conversations can become tangled before they properly begin.
Effective networks take time to clarify what they mean. The aim is not to force consensus but to create a common reference point that makes collaboration possible. For Test, Learn and Grow, describing what testing, learning and growing look like in practice will help people see how they can contribute and what they might expect in return.

Trusted spaces matter more than impressive structures

Design matters, but a network only becomes useful when people feel able to be candid. Public service reform involves uncertainty, political negotiation and the realities of delivering day-to-day services. In formal settings, stories are often polished because the environment demands it. Yet real learning also depends on being able to talk about the complicated parts.
In peer-learning settings across places, valuable conversations often begin with someone saying a change has not landed as they hoped and asking how others approached it. This shifts the conversation from presentation to open problem solving. It also helps build the relational infrastructure that allows people to work things out together.

Learning sticks when it comes from real work

People learn most when they look closely at what happened in practice. Theoretical discussions can be useful, but they rarely shift behaviour on their own. What makes a difference is examining real examples, whether changes to commissioning or procurement, new uses of data or efforts to involve residents earlier in shaping services.
Small, focused tests reveal things that formal strategies often miss. They show trade-offs, unintended consequences and the limits imposed by culture, capacity and technology. They also highlight how much progress depends on trust and informal connections. This rarely looks impressive from the outside, yet it is often the reason ideas take hold rather than fade away.
When insights from in-progress work are shared openly, they strengthen the wider system. One team’s procurement experiment becomes another’s starting point. One area’s approach to early engagement helps others avoid familiar frustrations. For Test, Learn and Grow, creating space for this practical learning will be more useful than presenting polished success stories.

Diverse perspectives improve insight

A combined authority, a rural council and a Whitehall team experience reform pressures differently, but many of the challenges they face are shared. Bringing these perspectives together can feel untidy, yet it deepens understanding and challenges assumptions. It also strengthens the coalition needed for reform, because insights can travel across boundaries rather than remain siloed.
Much of the work ahead will fall to people across many different places, often doing quiet and unglamorous things. When networks and institutions learn together, their efforts become more coherent and more effective. That is how systems start to shift.