Designing better public services in North East Lincolnshire

At North East Lincolnshire Council, Katie Patterson and Jack Seaton used their Service Designer apprenticeships to work on projects at the heart of public service delivery. Between them, their work covered children’s services, housing, accessibility, digital transformation and user-centred change. In a local authority serving around 156,900 people, improvements to housing, children’s services and access routes can affect large numbers of residents. [1]

Together, their stories show what service design looks like in practice in local government: improving how people experience services when they most need them. Katie focused on education services, while Jack worked on housing transformation and access to services, using the apprenticeship to apply service design tools to real projects with real users.

Finding a route into service design

Katie’s route into service design began when she moved from HR into what she described as “a prototype team for a new way of working”. In those early days, she was, as she put it, “little old me on my own at the start, learning what service design meant in practice.” Reflecting on that journey, Katie said:

“I can honestly, hand on heart, say I have found my niche. I have found what I’m good at, what I love doing, what I really want to do.”

Katie, Service Designer Apprentice
Katie Patterson

Jack came to service design from a different direction. He joined North East Lincolnshire Council on a graduate rotational placement, but after working on transformation projects he moved into a service designer role and started the apprenticeship as part of his development plan. His academic background was in politics, philosophy and economics, followed by a master’s degree in international politics, showing that there is no single route into service design.

Asked what drew him to the role, Jack said: “I think a lot of it was because it was very much evidence led and user led.”

Learning through live projects

For Katie and Jack, the apprenticeship was closely tied to their day-to-day roles. Rather than learning service design only in theory, they developed their skills through live projects already underway in the council. That meant using discovery, research, mapping, testing and iteration in real service areas, then reflecting on that work through the apprenticeship.

Assignments were built around real workplace projects, so the apprenticeship became a structured way to strengthen the work they were already doing. Instead of stepping away from the job to complete separate tasks, they were able to use live council projects as evidence for their learning, applying new methods in practice and then writing up what they had done, why it mattered and what changed as a result.

This close link between learning and practice was one of the things that made the programme so effective. It meant that their learning could immediately feed back into service improvements for residents, while also helping them build confidence and capability in their roles.

Key projects included:

One of Katie’s biggest apprenticeship projects was a three‑year programme delivered within a multidisciplinary team to design, develop, and roll out a cloud‑based solution for children’s services, bringing all children’s data into a single joined‑up record. Her service design work focused particularly on the redesign of education services, where she applied service design methods to understand user needs, map end‑to‑end journeys, and redesign the processes and touchpoints that shaped families’ and practitioners’ experiences. Katie used this experience as the basis for some of her assignments.

Designing better school admissions through service design

Katie worked with the schools admissions team, through which parents applied for school places for their children. She set out to put her service‑design skills into practice from the outset. This meant beginning with a thorough discovery phase: shadowing the admissions team, mapping parents’ full journey, and understanding what the experience really felt like for families. Keeping users at the heart of the work guided every step of the process. To build a clear picture of the admissions experience, she carried out user research across North East Lincolnshire. This included speaking to parents at a uniform swap day, running drop‑ins, and visiting Learning4Life, which supports families for whom English is not their first language. These conversations helped her develop user stories that highlighted the barriers residents face when accessing the service.

One insight stood out above everything else: many parents simply didn’t know when to apply for a school place. This became a key design challenge.

Turning insights into action

Using these insights Katie and the project team explored new and innovative ways to reduce barriers. One impactful idea came through working with Learning4Life, which incorporated admissions application form into English lessons to better support families who did not speak English as their first language. She also collaborated with them to refine plain‑language content and strengthen accessibility.

To improve communication and embed continuous improvements, the channels used to reach families were expanded and a communications plan that could be reused each year. Training was also delivered to community settings, annual drop‑in sessions were introduced and supported with reusable pop‑up banners and a leaflet was produced with a QR code to give parents quick and easy access to key information. Katie said, “This is the best bit — seeing the ideas come to life and knowing you’re making a real difference for families.

Testing the parent portal with real users

To ensure the new parent portal met user needs, Katie planned and delivered two usability testing sessions with local parents. The sessions were incredibly valuable and led to several improvements before launch, including:

  • 9 areas where we added clearer information
  • 6 configuration changes
  • 1 visual styling update

The testing made a measurable difference. Using feedback from parents, the service was able to launch a clearer, more intuitive portal that reduced confusion, strengthened accessibility, and improved the overall experience from day one.

Katie also highlighted how naturally the apprenticeship fitted with the job itself. “I found it easy because I was just writing what I was doing and I loved it.”

Jack used his housing transformation project for his end-point assessment. He described it as “a full service transformation piece of work,” focused on the assessment process for clients entering the housing system and linked to the implementation of a back-office system for recording those assessments more effectively. The scale of need made this work especially important. As of January 2023, there were 4,780 households on the North East Lincolnshire housing register. Nationally, 182,540 households in England were initially assessed as homeless and owed a relief duty in 2024/25. [3][4]

The work started as an issue around data quality, but as Jack and the team engaged they found a wider service problem. Clients were often being asked to repeat information at multiple points in the process, even when they were already in difficult circumstances. The result was a process that felt confusing and frustrating for residents.

Jack described the issue clearly: “Somebody would phone up to make a referral and kind of have to tell the story… then there was a different team… to do an initial assessment. So they’d have to repeat the story again. And then following that, it would be a case officer. So it would then be another repeat.” He added: “It was not a good time anyway for the client and then it was quite a convoluted process.”

Jack’s aim was to improve both the process and the flow of information behind the scenes, reducing unnecessary repetition for residents in stressful situations. As he put it, the goal was to make sure staff had “all the information that’s already been shared so we don’t have to ask for that repetition.”

This mattered because the service often involved sensitive and urgent situations. Jack said: “I think about half of the people that enter the housing system are either victims or part of a family where there’s been a victim of domestic abuse.”

His research also highlighted wider accessibility issues. “Parts of the assessment were overly complex, particularly the online referral form,” he said. He also pointed to the need to design around real local circumstances, residents of “…one of the wards from which we have the most referrals have an average reading age of eight.”

That made accessibility a central part of the work, alongside digital inclusion. Jack found that some residents did not have reliable access to the internet or even a mobile phone, so the service could not rely on digital channels alone. As the project widened, it began to look at how housing support was advertised and accessed more broadly. As Jack put it, “that can’t just be digital and social media because of the type of clients that would be trying to contact”.

Jack Seaton

Building confidence through the apprenticeship

For both Katie and Jack, the apprenticeship gave structure, language and confidence to work they were already beginning to do in practice.

For Katie, that meant validation as well as development. Having come into service design from another part of the council and largely taught herself, the apprenticeship gave her reassurance that the approaches she was using were grounded in strong practice.

She described having had “that niggle in the back of my mind” about whether, as someone self-taught, she was doing it right. The apprenticeship helped turn that experience into professional confidence. With that confidence, Katie attended a regional digital event for Yorkshire and Humber in Leeds, where she presented how service design sat at the centre of the new Children’s Services Platform. She is also an active member of the Local Government Service Design Network and is contributing to the design‑in‑local‑government Playbook, a resource that brings together real‑life experiences and practical tools from service design practitioners across local government. Katie said the apprenticeship had “really given me the confidence” to develop those external connections and keep growing professionally.

For Jack, the apprenticeship built confidence in a different way. While many of the tools were not entirely new to him, the programme helped him apply them more deliberately in complex settings and take on more visible leadership across projects. That included work spanning client experience, back-office processes, technology and change management.

Progression into new roles

By the end of their apprenticeships, both Katie and Jack were moving into new roles that reflected the growth in their skills and confidence. Katie moved on to a senior service designer role at North Lincolnshire Council, while Jack moved into a housing-focused project role at Hull City Council, taking the same user-led and evidence-led mindset into a role with broader project leadership responsibility.

Their progression shows the wider value of service design capability in local government: not abstract knowledge learned in isolation, but practical ways of improving systems, shaping better experiences for residents and helping councils respond more effectively to complex needs.

References