9:30am Coffee and Registration for 10:00am start

Cost: Statutory agencies: €600. Not for Profit: €400. This price includes all course materials, meals and refreshments.

Trainers: Trainers: Professor Toby Lowe, PERU, Manchester Metropolitan University & Dr Joan O’Donnell, UCD Geary Institute, Open University.

A two-day intensive programme for senior policymakers and practitioners

Creating the right systemic conditions for people and communities to thrive is a central concern for all public-facing services. Yet many public services remain organised around transactions, targets and narrowly defined interventions, despite working in contexts characterised by complexity, uncertainty and interdependence.

This two-day, practice-led programme introduces Relational Public Services and Human Learning Systems (HLS) as complementary approaches for transforming how public services respond to complex social challenges.

Relational Public Services focus on what matters to people. They build trusting relationships, strengthen connections within communities, and enable wellbeing, agency and positive outcomes to be co-created with citizens rather than simply delivered to them. Human Learning Systems provides a practical way of organising this work. It brings people, practitioners and organisations together around a shared purpose; supports learning from experience; and enables ongoing adaptation of practice, resources and accountability in response to what is learned.

Who is it for?

The programme is designed for senior policymakers, public service leaders, and practitioners who are working to reshape Irish public services to respond more effectively to complexity.

Participants are invited to bring a live policy, service or organisational challenge. Across the two days, they will develop a deeper understanding of relational practice and identify practical next steps for action, experimentation and learning in collaboration with citizens and communities. In advance of the programme, participants will be asked to submit a form outlining the situation they would like to work on and readings will be provided.

What will participants explore?

Across the two days, participants will:

• Explore the case for reframing public services as relational rather than transactional, drawing on Irish and international examples.
• Apply relational tools and experiments-from-the-field methods to their own service challenges.
• Examine the economic and fiscal implications of relational approaches, including evidence from home-visiting and other relational interventions.
• Design small-scale relational experiments that can generate learning in real-world settings.
• Develop a plan to cost, evaluate and make the case for relational approaches within existing accountability frameworks.
• Consider how learning, adaptation and collaboration can become routine features of public- service practice.

At the end of the two days, participants will have an action plan to support them to learn through doing.