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

4. Summary and next steps

This report reflects on the provision of Round 1 of the Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund. It provides lessons about what works in delivering evaluation support for diverse project teams as well as emerging reflections for initiatives and projects seeking to tackle child poverty.

Here, important lessons and reflections from across the report are summarised. These lessons and reflections will help to shape future rounds of CPAF. They may also have value for other approaches to tackle child poverty across Scotland.

Learnings from delivering monitoring and evaluation support to CPAF projects.

• Providing M&E upskilling and capacity building support for Fund recipients is important to raise the take-up and quality of M&E. It also supports the sharing of lessons and best practice.
• There are four important learnings from the Round 1 support provision.
• Collaboratively developing evaluation frameworks and M&E support is critical to tailor support to the needs of projects and to generate buy in about the importance of evaluation.
• A flexible and responsive approach to evaluation is important to support diverse projects and participants and the changing needs over time. A combination of group and one-to-one support can support this flexibility.
• Providing learning resources offline, in multiple formats, and in advance of any interactive session is important to embed learning. Having a repository of resources that participants can access after sessions is also important to reach changing team members and provide a lasting resource.
• Communities of practice are vital to support individuals and organisations to know how to best tackle child poverty. Providing regular opportunities for engagement, including where possible a combination of in-person and online sessions is important. This emerged organically in Round 1, but a more deliberate approach may be more valuable moving forward.

Emerging reflections about tackling child poverty

The experiences of the Urban Foresight in supporting the Round 1 CPAF projects has also highlighted four emerging reflections that are likely to be valuable for current and future CPAF projects. They may also be of relevance for other place-based initiatives working to tackle child poverty.

As noted, reflections are gained from conversations in workshops and one-to-one sessions and do not represent findings from a formal evaluation.

• Embedding co-design principles from the outset is important to develop interventions that address local needs. This includes engaging those with lived experience of poverty and those with professional practice.
• Testing innovative approaches means that project impacts may take a while to be realised and are subject to change as thinking develops. This means both funders and those designing and delivering interventions need to be comfortable with innovation, flexibility and change. Adapting funding structures to better account for the time taken to create connections could be important to develop meaningful change.
• Collaborative, partnership working is important to develop the conditions for long-term change and should be prioritised where possible.
• Sharing core learnings with other policy areas is important to ensure lessons from CPAF influence other approaches to child poverty, partnership working, and fund management. While it is important to share lessons, it is also useful to remember that ‘best practice’ may not exist. It is important that place-based contexts are not forgotten when considering how to scale or replicate interventions.