Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund: round 2 form and guidance

Why we have this fund

CPAF’s purpose is to support and strengthen local action to tackle child poverty. This is in line with the Scottish Government’s Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, Best Start, Bright Futures 2022 to 2026 and the Scottish Government’s Equality Mission to tackle poverty and protect people from harm.

Aims of the fund

CPAF aims to deliver on the priorities set out below, noting that not all applications/ projects will meet all of these criteria:

• tackling one or more of the three key drivers of child poverty (described more fully under ‘How to apply')
• prioritisation of one or more of the six priority family groups at greatest risk of child poverty ((described more fully under ‘How to apply')
• engagement with people with lived experience of poverty in project design and implementation
• potential scalability/sustainability of the project, if successful
• enhancing local partnership working
• generating evidence through rigorous evaluation, building the local and national evidence base
• innovation to accelerate practice to tackle child poverty

CPAF’s alignment with other initiatives

The broad intention of the CPAF projects may overlap with other policy initiatives. Receiving funding from other Scottish Government initiatives for separate projects does not exclude an area from submitting a CPAF proposal. However, in the application we ask that you set out how this project would build on other funding streams, and how impact or learning about tackling child poverty is either increased or complemented rather than duplicated. We will ask all applicants to certify that no other funding is being received from the Scottish Government to fund the specific activities in the proposal.

Where activities have previously been funded by the Scottish Government but are no longer receiving funding, this could be an eligible project. However, the applicant would need to be clear in the application on what has changed, what is being tested now, and how it would be sustained if in the past it has not been.

Projects supported through CPAF will contribute to the collective work on delivering differently to tackle child poverty alongside the Pathfinders set out in Best Start, Bright Futures, and other place based initiatives. Learning will be shared across partners, with monitoring and evaluation published and shared at the national level to ensure we build on success and learn from failure together.

For the purposes of CPAF, innovation can mean:

• new – never tried before
• new – new in this area (geographic or thematic), but good/promising evidence elsewhere
• new evaluation – an existing initiative that has not been evaluated to demonstrate impact