Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund: Island Communities Impact Assessment

Background and Purpose

The purpose of the Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund (referred to as “the Fund” in this assessment) 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 2022-26 (referred to as “the delivery plan” in this document) and the Scottish Government’s Equality Mission to tackle poverty and protect people from harm. Appreciating the different experiences of child poverty in island communities, the delivery plan was published alongside an Island Communities Impact Assessment.

As set out in the delivery plan we are committed to delivering place-based projects, testing different approaches to how we provide person centred solutions particularly for priority families^[1].

That is why we are seeking to work in partnership with a small number of geographical areas to deliver accelerator projects, trialling and evaluating new ways of working to overcome known challenges in tackling child poverty and sharing the learning from these projects to inform national policy and practice.

The fund aims to enhance an area’s approach to tackling child poverty and ultimately, drive progress towards the statutory child poverty targets. It will support small scale projects to generate evidence on a known problem, adapt a promising approach from elsewhere to work in an area, or re-design a service or services to deliver greater impact on child poverty.

The fund aims to deliver on the priorities set out below:

• Tackling one or more of the three key drivers of child poverty
• Prioritisation of one or more of the six priority family groups at greatest risk of child poverty
• 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

Applications to the fund will be assessed on these priorities. Successful bids to the fund are required to monitor and evaluate their project and will be supported by a national monitoring and evaluation coordinator. This is to ensure rigorous evaluation of projects so that we capture and share learning across Scotland to inform local and national policy and practice.

Intended impacts and outcomes of the fund are the same for island and mainland communities. However, we recognise that island communities face unique challenges and bring unique assets to bear on tackling child poverty. The fund is open to all local authorities and health boards and supports local solutions to tackling child poverty, and as such is designed to respond to the unique challenges and assets in island communities and generate evidence and practice relevant to those contexts.