By Colin Murphy, Senior Writer
Íris Smith remembers her moments of helplessness as a teacher in Reykjavík’s school system.
In 2019, multiple children out of the 23 students in her third-grade class needed specialized support that she wasn’t equipped to provide.
One of her 10-year-old students, who couldn’t speak and struggled to acquire basic math skills, waited months for specialized help, held up by a combination of the city school system’s inefficient, paper-based record-keeping process and a shortage of support staff.
Without a formal assessment, the student couldn’t receive the targeted support he urgently needed.
“That’s hard because I’m looking at this child, he doesn’t know how to count at 10 years old, and I don’t have the support,” said Smith. “I didn’t know who to turn to.”
Smith was not alone in her frustration. Students across Reykjavík’s 36 public schools faced similar delays when seeking support. Parents tried their best to navigate the complex and tedious system, but delays left them in limbo while their children fell further behind.
The COVID-19 pandemic intensified these issues. New stressors came to both children and teachers and further strained the city’s already overburdened support system.
The city was at a critical crossroads. Student well-being demanded urgent, transformative action. In 2021, then-Mayor Dagur Eggertsson and city leaders faced a choice: settle for the status quo or embrace bold, creative solutions. They recognized the potential of digitization and innovation to revolutionize processes, freeing up more time for teachers and support specialists to focus on student care.
“We want as much time and resources to be left to really work with children and support them in any way we can,” Eggertsson said. “So that was the motive to do better in a field that we cherish and know is important. We felt that we could do better.”
The city took action. Reykjavík established a Digital Innovation Team (i-team), funded by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies and supported by the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins. In alignment with the Prosperity Act, a nationwide law requiring better systems that “ensure effective and comprehensive services for every child,” Reykjavík’s digital i-team embarked on an ambitious plan: A Better City for Children.
Today, through the i-team’s work, on-site “solutions teams” in all city schools and a newly digitized recordkeeping system combine to provide faster, closer, more reliable, and targeted support for students in need.
No assumptions: taking public innovation pathways to tackle challenges
Replacing the analog knot of slow processes, inconsistent forms from school to school, and security and sustainability concerns created by storing large amounts of paper files required digitization; the i-team knew this.
But team members also knew that improving the lives of children required much more than an infusion of tech. Addressing the issue required the team to apply rigorous innovation methodology, data collection, and a human-centered approach to fully understand resident needs – before prototyping solutions.
“The possibility that the i-team saw was that this was about children and their actual well-being,” said Björg Flygenring Finnbogadóttir, Reykjavík’s i-team’s service designer. “This service needs to be very human…The core goal is to actually help people and to understand their real problems. The team is really aligned to that goal.”
To reach that goal, the five-member i-team conducted interviews with 35 school and support staff members and 16 families to deeply understand the problems facing Reykjavík’s children, teachers, and parents.
“A lot of these interviews were heartbreaking,” said Finnbogadóttir. “Children are having problems in school, and [their parents] want to do everything they can for their children, but it was a very complicated process, and nobody knew how things worked.”
Eggertsson, Reykjavík’s Mayor from 2014 to 2024 who trained and worked as a physician before entering politics, was passionate about the project. He was supportive as the i-team extensively researched the lived experiences of the city’s residents in a way that showed compassion and demonstrated a commitment to serving the needs of the city’s people.
“Innovate,” said Eggertsson, describing the team’s direction, “but always with a focus on who is using the services: What do they define as the largest problems?”
Gathering data – with creativity and sensitivity
Through interviews with parents, teachers, school behavioral specialists, and administrators, the team saw the pain points of the adults who support children. But the team also faced an unfamiliar challenge: how could they capture, validate, and integrate the perspectives of the students, many of whom were very young, in a way that was inviting, caring, and sensitive? The task was ill-fit for a question-based survey or a cold interview that could feel to young people like an interrogation.
The team’s personnel included Embla Vigfusdottir in the role of Artist-in-Resident. A creator and designer trained to collaboratively engage clients to come up with ideas, Vigfusdottir “had the idea to have a workshop with [children] where they’re creating something with their hands but at the same time they are answering questions.”
The team invited 160 children aged 10-11 to a series of art-making activities in which they threaded colored beads onto strings, with different colors and shapes of beads representing different responses, experiences, and emotions. Warm colors represented feelings of safety and confidence; cool colors represented feelings of difficulty or isolation. Children were asked questions such as, “How did you feel at school yesterday?” “Do you have someone to talk to when you feel bad or have a problem?” And, tellingly: “Do you have a friend?”
The result was a large data set and corresponding artifact – a wall of art that doubled as a data visualization – that immediately conveyed trends in child well-being throughout city schools. The data artwork, displayed in a public exhibition intended to educate the city’s residents about the work the team was undertaking, opened eyes and minds to the need for more streamlined, targeted support for students.
“It worked so well because we could get answers from so many kids in one hour, and we could see the results visually,” said Vigfusdottir. “People just reacted so differently to the beads than if it was just a number in a spreadsheet, because you feel it.”
She said the data artwork naturally opened up authentic conversations about student well-being.
“When [the beaded data artworks were] presented, I could hear so many conversations happening between parents and their kids,” said Vigfusdottir. “The parents would want to know why their kids felt a certain way, and so the parents and their kids would start talking in a different way.”
Another work of art developed by Vigfussdottir and the team was a convoluted marble maze that represented the time-consuming, disorganized status quo of marshaling student support. Parents and city residents could see how many obstacles and pitfalls the marble had to navigate to reach its destination – how many hurdles students and teachers faced when requesting support – and it served as a catalyst for gaining broader public backing for the need for an overhaul to the system.
Siad Vigfusdottir, “An exhibition like [this] really gets people on board with us.”
Close the gaps – in time, personnel, and physical distance
With rich input from city residents – teachers, parents, school workers, and children – the team set out to prototype solutions that addressed the most pressing needs of everyone involved.
In early 2024, in two of the city’s 36 public schools, the city prototyped on-site “solutions teams” that could manage individual-level concerns and meet regularly with students and parents. The solutions teams comprised administrators, after-school program directors, behavioral specialists, and the student’s teacher, with the goal of timely, early intervention.
Brynhildur Arna Jónsdóttir, the project’s Implementation Manager, said physical proximity is a key complement to the city schools’ nascent digitization efforts.
“We knew the problem,” Arna Jónsdóttir, “and we knew that we needed to come closer.”
To do that, the team standardized on-site solutions teams in all 36 city schools beginning in the 2024-2025 school year.
The results have transformed how support services are requested, marshaled, and matched with students.
“Now, you don’t have to wait,” said Arna Jónsdóttir. “If [a teacher] feels there is a problem, [they] just go directly within the school to the special education manager, and the solution team will meet within 10 days at every school.”
In a recent survey, 94.5 percent of teachers and administrators said that the solutions teams exceeded expectations in supporting better student care.
And, while providing an immediate improvement from the status quo, the solutions teams also provide the early intervention needed to prevent problems from compounding as students grow and develop.
“With early intervention and these teams, we can ensure we have fewer students who develop bigger problems that are more heavy and are not as easily resolved in the future,” said Arna Jónsdóttir. “Those two together – the digitalization and the solutions teams – will make the most difference in how children will thrive in school.”
Schools’ analog case management systems are also being replaced with digital recordkeeping, with rollout at the start of the 2024-2025 school year.
Smith, the teacher who was at a loss for how to best help her 2019 class of nearly two-dozen 10-year-olds, recently checked in on her student who struggled with basic math.
“He is now getting the support he needs,” she said, noting the same is true for her and her colleagues when new student needs arise. “The system is better now. There’s more structure. I can just send one email: This is my problem. Can you help me solve it? And [the solutions teams] do everything they can…We are like a team, all together.”
The innovation-focused way of working
Eggertsson, who supported the city’s transition to Mayor Einar Þorsteinsson in 2024, is passionate about doing better for the city’s school children in ways that directly impact their lives and the lives of those supporting them.
“We are not there yet,” said Eggertsson about the Better City for Children project. “We are going to dig deep, listen, and see what people tell us, both children and parents, but also teachers and people who work in the schools, and use the same methods to innovate and find solutions.”
Walking the path through a rigorous public innovation methodology to an innovative solution is something the digital i-team knows is critical to serve residents with excellence. The same innovation methodology used to create, maintain, and iterate A Better City for Children will continue to be used, for example, on the project’s next phase, which aspires to better serve the diverse language needs of the city’s growing immigrant population.
Broadly, Eggertsson knows that the City of Reykjavík, like all cities, must embrace public innovation as a way of working in every aspect of service provision if it wants to be a vibrant and thriving place that supports full lives for residents.
“Now, when cities are growing, there’s ambition everywhere to do better,” he said. “To respond to that, we have to innovate. We have to be willing to change and see change as an opportunity, not something that is an exception.”