Improving school performance by design

Organising a ‘not like us’ educational study tour

Stakeholder Design’s ‘not like us’ study tours have been described by many school leaders as life-changing. Five years after the first trip was organised, two of the participating headteachers ran up to me in a hotel and told me that they still think about the tour every day. They can be seen in the video [...]

Building a new children’s hospital – from world class to world first

Stakeholder Design is proud to announce that the partners it was supporting in the £237 million bid to rebuild Alder Hey Children’s Hospital have been formally chosen for the work. Stakeholder Design created and facilitated stakeholder engagement sessions with children and parents, stretching and enhancing their aspirations for future healthcare and championing their views within the [...]

The best designers in Ireland

Inside a run-down convent in Cork, a community of nuns, Travellers, recent immigrants, ex-offenders, recovering addicts, old and young came together to visualise and prototype a whole raft of future social services. This is what the Irish Examiner made of their story. Nuns have put their faith in a business process used by Nike and [...]

Effective communication – rebranding a charity

Effective communication is the key to securing public sympathy and influence. Here, I’ve retold the story of how Marketing Magazine gave us a national award for best implementation of a new brand identity. It’s 7.30am and I’m standing in the conference room at St Thomas’ Hospital in London. In an hour’s time, 200 delegates from [...]

How much does pain cost?

The depressive effect of chronic pain is so great that eradicating it would lift the country out of recession. Following the Societal Impact of Pain conference in Copenhagen, the Huffington Post asked me to write a column explaining how we could use chronic pain as a catalyst to recover from recession and improve quality of [...]

Village signs and rural isolation

Why do village signs look the way they do? Too often, we allow them to brand villages as old-time, backwards-looking and conservative. Children are the losers. Although the village in which I used to live is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, it doesn’t have a village sign worthy of attention – just the [...]

Back pain in young adults

Half of all adults aged 18-35 now experience back pain. The cost to society is around £12.3 billion a year. As Acting CEO of BackCare I fronted new research for the ‘Can You Feel My Pain?‘ campaign linking it to the ‘sit still’ culture in our schools and offices. This is what the Daily Telegraph [...]

The Societal Impact of Pain – how much does pain cost?

Here are some facts about the impact that chronic pain has on individuals, families and society as a whole. I’ll be speaking about this at the 2012 Societal Impact of Pain conference in Copenhagen, which runs from 29-31 May – the full programme is available here. Incapacity benefit already costs the UK economy £6.7 billion [...]

Improving school performance by design

Are you one of those headteachers who has been left wondering how to keep driving up standards when you can barely get the students down the corridors between lessons? Well, help is at hand (nearly). Later this term, Stakeholder Design will be publishing a new booklet on school design called “It’s Not About the Building.” [...]

The Northern Ireland Pain Summit

In advance of the first Northern Ireland Pain Summit on Tuesday 15 May 2012, this very interesting radio interview establishes that one in five of the population are living in constant pain. As Chair of Pain UK, I am really looking forward to attending the event and welcoming the Pain Alliance of Northern Ireland as [...]