Tackling child poverty delivery plan 2022-2026 - annex 3: child poverty measurement framework – updated

Measurement Indicators and Priority Families

The indicators included in the child poverty measurement framework do so at a high level to understand how child poverty rates are being driven across the Scottish population. This is useful because it allows us to gather an overall picture of how we are making progress towards improving the key drivers of poverty and delivering upon the 2030 targets.

We know, however, that there are certain family groups in the population that are at higher risk of child poverty. These are:

Figure 2: Priority family types

• Families with a baby under one
• Families with three or more children
• Lone parent families
• Young mother (under 25)
• Minority ethnic families
• Families with a disabled adult or child

In order to better understand how specific priority group families are experiencing the drivers of poverty it is useful to be able to access and consider data which can describe and track progress for each group. By doing this, trends and gaps in progress for specific groups can be tracked to identify where specific barriers in meeting the child poverty targets may be and where further areas for targeted action are required.

Over the period of the first delivery plan, we have provided focus reports on three priority family types. Lone parent families, minority ethnic families and families with a disabled adult or child. The last progress report on the first plan, due in Summer 2022, will look at two further groups: young mothers (i.e. those aged under 25) and families with a baby under one.^[14] Additionally, Public Health Scotland has provided an overview for families with three or more children.

Going forwards, we will investigate options for providing more regular breakdowns for each priority group. An initial assessment of the data showed important challenges. For example, sometimes, sample sizes can be small and not reliable enough to comment on significant differences or trends in data. Additionally, not every dataset used to track the indicators collects information on the priority family types (although where possible indicators have been designed to use datasets which do collect this). During the first year of the second delivery plan, we will complete the assessment of the data to understand how possible and accurate it is to provide regular measurement framework updates across all priority family types.