Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund (CPAF) round 1: reflections and lessons

1. Introduction

What is CPAF?

The Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund (CPAF) is a Scottish Government-led bid-in fund that is open to local authorities and health boards.

Launched in 2023, CPAF provides time-bound funding to local areas to test and deliver innovative projects to tackle child poverty. The aim of the Fund is to foster or accelerate innovation by creating a safe space for learning from successes and challenges.

Specifically, CPAF aims to ‘provide support to enhance an area’s approach to tackling child poverty’. It does so by supporting ‘small scale projects to generate evidence on a known problem, adapt a promising approach from elsewhere […], or re-design a service or services to deliver greater impact on child poverty.’

Given the complexity of drivers and outcomes of child poverty, CPAF recognises that a one-size-fits-all solution is unlikely to exist. It instead encourages local places to innovate by trying new activities, implementing activities that are new to a local or thematic area, or evaluating and developing evidence around activities that been tried but not yet evaluated to demonstrate impact.

Given the trial and test nature, an essential element of the work is ensuring ongoing evaluation of the projects so that learning can be developed and shared across Scotland..

How does CPAF support Scottish Government priorities?

Best Start, Bright Futures is the Scottish Government’s overall plan for tackling child poverty. The Plan is underpinned by a ‘commitment to deliver differently’ and ‘foster innovation.’ A series of policies contribute to the Scottish Government’s priority to end child poverty. CPAF is one, and others include Cash First, Whole Family Wellbeing Fund, and the Pathfinder programmes.

In line with the Verity House Agreement, the Scottish Government and Local Government are also committed to ‘evidence-based policy making, using data to understand issues and to then identify the most appropriate means of tackling them’. A key enabler of this work is collecting and sharing learning with partners to promote evidence-based transformation.

By testing innovations encouraging the use of new, place-based, partnership-driven means of working, CPAF contributes to these broader priorities.

Overview of CPAF projects

CPAF was open to local authorities and health boards. Applicants could apply for a maximum of £80,000 for a period of up to 18 months (ending by March 2025). In total, the Scottish Government received 29 applications for Round 1. Funding was awarded to nine projects.

CPAF projects were required to do some, but not all, of the following aspects:

• Tackle one or more of the three key drivers of child poverty.
• Prioritise one or more of the six priority family groups at greatest risk of child poverty.
• Engage people with lived experience of poverty in project design and implementation.
• Enhance local partnership working.
• Generate evidence through rigorous evaluation, building the local and national evidence base.
• Innovate to accelerate practice on tackling child poverty.
• Consider the potential for scalability and sustainability of the intervention, if successful.

Projects could target improvements to service design and delivery; improvement of uptake and engagement with services; improvement of understanding, targeting and monitoring and evaluation of activities; and/or broadening the range of services or sectors working on child poverty.

The successful projects are diverse across timescales, aims and objectives, target populations and overall approaches. 1: Summaries of projects funded by CPAF Round 1 provides further detail on the nine projects awarded funding.

Commitment to evaluation

Given the focus on testing place-specific innovations, the Scottish Government is keen to ensure that learning is gathered and shared across CPAF recipients and nationally. This ensures successes are built on and challenges are avoided.

The Scottish Government therefore identified the importance of embedding Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) from an early stage and M&E was built in as a requirement of the Fund. Due to the broad scope of the Fund in delivering on discrete objectives in local areas, for priority families or for issues that are not necessarily defined by place, the nature and intensity of M&E was expected to vary across each respective project. Further, given the small scale of the funding, the official M&E requirements were set to be flexible, with existing M&E capacity expected to vary between areas.

This report

This report summarises the support offer provided for Round 1 CPAF recipients and presents learnings and reflections from Round 1 of CPAF.

The report is structured into four chapters including this Introduction.

• 2. Lessons about providing evaluation support outlines the how the evaluation support was designed and delivered and provides a series of lessons to guide future support packages.
• 3. Emerging reflections provides emerging and anecdotal reflections around what Round 1 CPAF projects are finding when running their projects.
• 4. Summary and next steps provides a brief recap of the main lessons about providing evaluation support and the emerging reflections from Round 1.

Annex 2: Terminology used in this report provides definitions of acronyms and terms used throughout the report.