Social Return on Investment (SROI) Practitioner Course
We were delighted to support Centre for Care PhD Student Charlie Grosset to attend the 5 day online accredited Social Value and SROI practitioner Training, led by Dr Adam Richards. Starting on January the 20th, 2026.
We asked Charlie to tell us why they feel SROI is so important and how this will benefit their work and career plans going forward.
Charlie Says:
Initially it feels important to highlight what Social Return on Investment (SROI) is. Social Return on Investment (SROI) is a methodological framework used to understand and evidence the wider social value created by services, programmes, or interventions. Rather than focusing solely on financial cost, SROI considers the broader impacts people experience in their lives, relationships, wellbeing, and communities.
- What did you use the SSCR Capacity funding to do?
One of the things that interested me most about the training was its focus on understanding and evidencing the broader social value created through services and interventions. Through funding from the SSCR Capacity Development programme, I was able to attend the Institute for Social Value’s accredited Social Value and SROI Practitioner Training course. Delivered across five intensive online sessions, the course introduced participants to the key stages of the SROI process, including stakeholder identification, outcome mapping, measuring change, valuing outcomes, and avoiding over-claiming impact.
The training was particularly valuable because it combined practical evaluation tools with critical reflection on how impact is measured and represented. Exercises throughout the course encouraged participants to think carefully about whose perspectives are included in evaluation processes, how outcomes are evidenced, and how social value can be embedded into organisational practice. Alongside this, I was able to develop a working Social Return on Investment spreadsheet, providing an accessible starting point for designing and conducting future SROI projects.
The course also gave me the opportunity to formalise and build upon skills developed through my employment prior to beginning my PhD. In addition, it created valuable opportunities to network with participants from across the third sector, academia, public sector organisations, and private industry. One particularly interesting discussion was with a researcher from Swansea University working on unpaid care research, whose work explored how unpaid care might be more effectively recognised and valued through existing economic and evaluative approaches.
Overall, the training provided an important opportunity to strengthen and accredit my methodological skills, develop practical experience of SROI processes and tools, and connect with academics and professionals interested in social value, care, and evaluation research.
- How has it/will it help(ed) your development/the development of others?
For me, the course strongly complemented my wider research interests in disability, care, and social policy. Much of my PhD research explores forms of care and support that are often overlooked or undervalued within policy and welfare systems. SROI offered a useful framework for thinking about how relational, preventative, and community-based forms of care might be better evidenced within applied social care research and evaluation.
The training also broadened my methodological skillset beyond traditional qualitative research methods. In particular, it strengthened my understanding of applied evaluation approaches that are increasingly relevant across social care research, commissioning, charities, and policy contexts. I hope these skills will support future collaborative work with organisations seeking to evidence the wider social impacts of their work, while remaining attentive to the complexities of lived experience and care relationships.
A particularly valuable aspect of the course was developing my understanding of key concepts within SROI analysis, including deadweight, attribution, and counterfactual thinking. The training provided practical guidance on the stages involved in conducting an SROI calculation, while also emphasising the importance of engaging participants in discussions about change, impact, and lived experience. This reinforced for me how qualitative and experiential knowledge can strengthen evaluative work and provide greater depth and robustness to social value calculations.
Overall, the course helped me build confidence in using mixed and applied methodological approaches, while also encouraging critical reflection on how social value is understood, measured, and represented within social care research.
- What’s next? Will this form part of a future grant proposal, a publication or a new set of skills/methodologies?
Looking ahead, I hope to continue developing the methodological and evaluative skills introduced through the training. In particular, I am interested in how SROI approaches might complement qualitative and participatory methods within social care research, especially in areas where the social value of care, support, and community interventions is often difficult to evidence through conventional outcome measures alone. I also hope to build on this training through future funding applications and collaborative research opportunities. One potential avenue is the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Development and Skills Enhancement (DSE) Award, which supports researchers in developing specialist methodological and applied research skills to support the next stage of their careers. The SROI training has provided a strong foundation for thinking about how evaluative and mixed-methods approaches can be incorporated into future applied social care research.
More broadly, the course encouraged me to think more critically about how we evidence impact within social care and welfare contexts, and whose experiences and outcomes are recognised within these processes. As I move toward the later stages of my PhD and future postdoctoral work, I hope to continue developing approaches that combine robust evaluation methods with attention to lived experience, relational care, and social justice.