Tackling child poverty - place-based, system change initiatives: learnings

2. Overview of system change approaches focused on tackling child poverty

Key messages

There are eight initiatives in scope for this baseline report which were selected as they seek to achieve the following objectives, in order to help reduce child poverty:

• Ensuring the design and delivery of services is based on the distinctive needs of individual communities through a place-based approach
• A holistic and person-centred approach to the provision of support that wraps around the needs of the individual
• Partnership working from across the public, third and/or private sectors and between local and national partners, with join-up in the range of support provided to help move people out of poverty
• A move away from crisis responses towards more preventative action

There is substantial overlap between the four objectives. For example, initiatives working to develop and enhance partnership working are most likely seeking to provide join-up across the child poverty support system too.

These objectives are frequently embedded in initiatives’ delivery frameworks and plans. In some cases, these also link to wider policy objectives, for example, enhanced partnership working is further supported by work related to the Verity House Agreement between COSLA and the Scottish Government.

Many of the system change initiatives are also aligned to a wider policy agenda of moving from crisis to preventative action, consistent with the Christie Commission principles on the future of integrated public services in Scotland.

This section provides an overview of the initiatives in scope for this baseline report. As detailed in our overarching logic model for place-based, system change approaches, all of these initiatives were originally selected because they seek to embed the following principles in order to help tackle child poverty:

• Ensuring the design and delivery of services is based on the distinctive needs of individual communities through a place-based approach
• A holistic and person-centred approach to the provision of support that wraps around the needs of the individual
• Partnership working from across the public, third and/or private sectors and between local and national partners, with join-up in the range of support provided to help move people out of poverty
• A move away from crisis responses towards more preventative action

The eight initiatives included in the report are:

• Dundee Child Poverty Pathfinder - a collaborative initiative between Dundee City Council, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), the Scottish Government, Social Security Scotland and other partners, aiming to support parents to move out of poverty on a sustained basis, working across boundaries to provide holistic approaches centred around a family’s specific needs.
• Glasgow Child Poverty Pathfinder - Glasgow City Council, the Scottish Government, Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) and the Improvement Service working together, using a ‘No Wrong Door’ approach, to achieve better outcomes for families by reforming systems and removing barriers (including siloes, data sharing and restrictive funding), to enable the delivery of holistic person-centred services.
• Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund (CPAF) – A Scottish Government fund to support small scale, local projects to test and innovate ways of working and generate evidence on what works to tackle child poverty.
• Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy - The key objective is for mental health considerations to be integrated into all policy. This will be achieved via a phased approach, prioritising areas where there is already joined-up links, such as employability and child poverty.
• No One Left Behind (NOLB) – an integrated approach to employability services, underpinned by a partnership approach to design and delivery between Scottish Government and local authorities. The programme aims to provide a flexible, user-centred system, that helps people to find, stay in and progress in sustainable work.
• School Age Childcare - building a system of school age childcare, offering care before and after school and during the holidays, by taking a person-centred and place-based approach and designing services collaboratively with families, childcare providers and the wider public sector, in order to meet individual and community needs.^[8] A test of change approach has been adopted to test ways to design and deliver an effective all year-round school age childcare offer for families in targeted areas. This includes funding services through the Access to Childcare fund and by funding local authorities for six communities across Scotland that are part of ‘Early Adopter Communities’ project.
• Social Innovation Partnership (SIP) - using a distinctive wellbeing and capabilities approach to tackling poverty and inequality, that supports people to live flourishing lives based on what matters to them, and testing and embedding this approach in service design and delivery across the public sector through the Clackmannanshire Family Wellbeing Partnership.
• Whole Family Wellbeing Funding (WFWF) - supporting ‘whole system transformational change’ in order to reduce the need for crisis intervention in families and shift investment towards prevention and early intervention, so that families have access to the range of services they need, when they need them, and for as long as they need, to help them flourish and thrive.

Further contextual information on each initiative can be found in the overarching logic model. This includes an overview of delivery, timescales and partners for each individual initiative, and explains how each initiative intends to contribute to system change and child poverty reduction.

Approaches to system change across initiatives

There are a range of approaches taken by the selected initiatives in order to achieve system change. This section outlines how the initiatives seek to embed the four principles referred to at the start of this chapter.

A place-based approach

In 2019 the Scottish Government and the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) agreed to adopt the Place Principle to help overcome organisational and sectoral boundaries, to encourage collaboration and community involvement, and improve the impact of combined energy, resources and investment. It is the overarching context for place-based working in Scotland. In particular, the Place Principle seeks to:

“…promote a shared understanding of place, and the need to take a more collaborative approach to a place’s services and assets to achieve better outcomes for people and communities. The principle encourages and enables local flexibility to respond to issues and circumstances in different places.” Place Principle

Further, in the second Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, Best Start, Bright Futures, (BSBF), there was a commitment that ‘the design and delivery of holistic services needs to be based in the needs of the community’.

For all of the initiatives included in this report, there is a place-based element, with many explicitly underpinned by the Place Principle. Key to the place-based approach is the flexibility to provide services which meet local needs. However, what this looks like and what this means in theory and practice varies across initiatives.

All initiatives sought to be flexible and adaptable to the needs of local communities. For example, NOLB was viewed by local stakeholders as ‘an opportunity to tailor provision more closely to local needs and to focus more on partnership delivery at the local level’ (NOLB implementation evaluation report), while School Age Childcare seeks to ‘take a place-based approach, recognising that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to providing school age childcare within communities’. This is particularly evident in the work with Early Adopter Communities.

Early findings from many of the initiatives suggests that the place-based approach is viewed positively across all stakeholders. For example, one stakeholder from the Pathfinders noted it ‘…is about really truly understanding the needs of that community as a whole’ (Pathfinders early implementation report). This is highlighted in the approach adopted by School Age Childcare:

“By taking an approach which delivers the outcomes which are important to particular communities, we recognise that co-design may lead us to distinct school age childcare systems and services in different places.” (School Age Childcare Delivery Framework).

Holistic and person-centred support

A recent publication exploring the use of person-centred approaches to public service delivery in Scotland identified four key attributes essential to person-centred approaches:

• Holistic – starting from an understanding of the person and their needs, acknowledging the complexity and individuality of people’s lives
• Ethical – adhering to a set of strong ethical principles such as dignity, respect, the avoidance of stigma, integrity, compassion, empathy and honesty
• Assets-based - building on the strengths of the person and their informal networks, laying the foundations for co-production and community based working
• Relational – recognising the importance of building relationships and trust, while acknowledging these take time to develop and foster and the role of strong interpersonal skills within the public services workforce

The 2nd Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, BSBF, committed to a holistic, person-centred package of family support as being key to ensuring that families receive ‘the right support at the right time, for as long as they need it, creating the conditions for families to navigate their way out of poverty’. This approach is also supported by a body of wider evidence, which emphasises the importance of providing personalised, holistic and whole-family support for addressing poverty[9].

All of the initiatives included in this analysis have a person-centred approach as a key objective.

Commonly, across the initiatives, the aim was for families to receive the necessary support at the right time – in line with the policy ambition set out in BSBF. For example:

• The WFWF focuses on ‘holistic family support readily available to all families that need it….families are able to access the help they need, where and when they need it’ (WFWF interim report).
• NOLB seeks to provide ‘a flexible, user-centred employability system aimed at helping people to find, stay and progress in sustainable work’ (NOLB implementation evaluation report).
• A key area of focus for the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy is ensuring that services are responsive to individual needs which people are able to access ‘at the right time, in the right place and in the right way’.
• A key recommendation from the Pathfinders early implementation report notes that they ‘should continue to be built around and commit to providing person-centred support, providing the right level and type of support that each family needs at the right time’.
• The person-centred approach of School Age Childcare is centred on engaging and co-creating with local communities. This seeks to ensure that parents, carers, children and providers are involved in co-designing school age childcare services which best meet their needs (School Age Childcare Delivery Framework).
• The SIP’s approach aims to support people to live flourishing lives through more person-centred and holistic support.. It uses capabilities as a lens to focus on the outcomes valuable to individuals, while recognising the wider context and structural factors, such as material and economic circumstances, that influence whether these outcomes are achieved. This framing is used as a conceptual model for describing and articulating the approach that SIP partners adopt to support positive outcomes for the people they work with (SIP learning programme final report).

Partnership working and join-up across the system

BSBF also set out an ambition to enhance partnership working across the public, private and third sectors, and at all levels, in order to help deliver reductions in child poverty.

In June 2023, COSLA and the Scottish Government agreed a Partnership Agreement, the Verity House Agreement, which sets out principles for working together, collaboratively, to deliver shared priorities, including tackling poverty. Therefore, steps are being taken to further develop partnership working across the Scottish policy system. However, partnership working is a first step, there also needs to be join-up across the system, with policy areas and partners working together in alignment, with shared aims, in order to improve lives for families.

These two objectives, partnership working and join-up across the system, are also key to all of the selected initiatives and as this report details, there are initial steps being taken to develop these ways of working and to develop a more aligned system.

The key delivery aim of NOLB provides a high-level understanding of how partnership working and join-up in the system should look – and work for families. In particular, it sets out the intention for Scottish Government and local government to work more collaboratively with the third and private sectors ‘to identify local needs and make informed, evidence-based decisions, flexing these to meet emerging labour market demands’. Through this collaborative approach it is intended that partnerships will ‘ensure a holistic, inclusive and universal approach’ to employability services in Scotland (No One Left Behind implementation report).

The WFWF interim report explains how an aligned and joined up service could provide maximum benefit for families, with a particular focus on building relationships of trust between families and services. This is to be developed through a joining-up of provision for families, across a range of services provided by different organisations. The aim is that families will avoid engaging with a multitude of services and their needs will be met through holistic family support (Whole Family Wellbeing Funding interim report).

The Pathfinders also seek to develop ‘joined-up services, where families experiencing child poverty are no longer affected by disaggregated service provision’. In particular, both Pathfinders seek to embed a ‘no wrong door’ model, which means that no matter where, how and why an individual engages in the system, this interaction becomes a gateway to receiving comprehensive and holistic support. This is a collaborative approach involving several partners and stakeholders in order to ensure the right support and services are put in place for individuals and families.

The intention to work across policy areas, and across all levels of the system, is set out in many delivery plans. For example, the Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy Delivery Plan commits to cross-policy actions to address a wide range of social, economic and environmental factors which impact on an individual’s mental health and wellbeing, while in the School Age Childcare Delivery Framework there is a clear intention to work alongside other policies and partners to understand and maximise the benefits to the school age childcare offer.

A move from crisis to preventative action

The 2023 tackling child poverty progress report for BSBF outlined the need to ‘continue to focus on long term prevention of child poverty as well as mitigating the impacts of the ongoing cost of living crisis’. This has been a longstanding ambition, first set out by the Christie Commission in 2011 and built upon as part of the Covid Recovery Strategy which sought a renewed focus on prevention – and in particular, early and preventative support for children and families.

This aim of moving from crisis support to prevention is embedded across a number of place-based, system change initiatives. In particular, Whole Family Wellbeing Funding (WFWF) seeks to focus on ‘the system changes required to shift investment towards early intervention and prevention activities, to ensure families can access support before they reach crisis point’. Similarly the Pathfinders aim to test approaches to putting the Christie principles into practice, by building individual and community capability and wellbeing to ensure the sustainability of services. Early implementation findings from the Pathfinders highlight that support has included crisis and preventative support, with the crisis support deemed essential in building relationships and trust from which preventative and longer-term support could be provided.

Across some initiatives, the potential economic benefits of a move from crisis to preventative action were noted. For example, while the key aim of all initiatives is to reduce child poverty, there is also an intention to use this approach as a way of spending money more cost-effectively in the longer term, reducing the cost of crisis responses, and several of the initiatives included in this report have an evaluation element assessing value for money. These findings will be available as evaluations progress. However, some of the early findings from evaluations suggest that there are a range of challenges associated with the shift to more preventative support. These will be explored in Chapter Three.