Appendix One contains more information about how we carried out the project, the Standards We Expect on which this book is based. The accent in the project was very much on people's direct and meaningful involvement – as service users, carers, practitioners and managers. As well as being a participatory research project, it was also a development project. This meant that a constant concern of ours was both to enable as wide a range of people to get involved in it – including people facing many barriers – and also for the project to be able to make a difference to them.

For this reason we had to pay particular attention to encouraging and supporting people's involvement and meeting their access and support needs. We knew from experience that this could be a complex matter that required careful planning and thought. We needed to ensure people also had as clear an idea of what we were trying to do as possible, so that they would feel comfortable getting involved and more likely to want to do so.

We therefore developed plans and policies for their involvement and to ensure that it was involvement based on clear information and informed consent. We also wanted to make the most of the experience and expertise that participants had to offer. We produced a considerable amount of documentation – accessible documentation – which set out and helped us to record what we were doing, what we wanted to find out about and what we were learning. We needed to be clear among ourselves – as well as being clear to participants.

This resulted in a plethora of schedules, guidance notes and protocols. We thought it would be helpful for these to be available for interested readers who might want to carry out a similar kind of project themselves or who wanted as clear an idea as possible of how we carried out this project.

To enable people to access this material, we have placed this series of 27 appendices on the Supporting people book page at www.policypress.co.uk. The material includes a significant portion of the documentation associated with the Standards We Expect project.