Alice Benton
People sometimes ask why we are called At Scale. The short answer is that we spotted the NHS Long Term Plan (2019) used the phrase a lot, but “at scale” was already in use well before that across NHS policy and service reform thinking. Earlier documents, including the Five-Year Forward View in 2014 and the General Practice Forward View in 2016 were already talking about services operating, collaborating and improving at scale.
That mattered to us, because the phrase captured something important about the future of public service delivery. Not “bigger is automatically better”, because public services have heard that one before, usually just before being handed a larger geography, a smaller budget and a meeting about transformation. For us, at scale working means helping organisations deliver high-quality services across a broader footprint, a more complex partnership landscape and a wider population, without losing the local relationships and practical grip that make teams and services work in real life.
That idea runs through everything we do. We support organisations to work more credibly and effectively, and with NHS, local government and community partners. Our work spans bids, business cases, governance, mobilisation, partnership development, neighbourhood models and service redesign. On paper those can look like very different assignments. In practice they are all versions of the same challenge, helping services function consistently, collaboratively and credibly at scale.
The theme is more relevant now than ever. Across England, public services are being pushed towards neighbourhood delivery, provider collaboration, place-based working, devolution and more joined-up operating models. Scale is no longer just NHS language, it is increasingly the reality across health, care, local government and wider public service reform.
So, our name was never just a brand. It was a description of the kind of problems we help solve, and the kind of public service future many organisations are now being asked to build.
We help clients make sense of change, turn ambition into delivery, and work more confidently at scale. If this resonates with what your organisation is facing, do get in touch with us on LinkedIn, by email at alice.benton@atscale.co.uk, or via www.atscale.co.uk.
