Tackling child poverty delivery plan - progress report 2022-23: annex c - priority family types - approach to reporting evidence

Introduction

The Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017 requires the Scottish Government and its partners to meet, by 2030, four poverty targets. In order to meet these targets, the Scottish Government is required to produce three delivery plans in the period to 2030, setting out action to delivery progress. In addition, annual reports are published summarising ongoing progress.

The evaluation strategy sets out how we assess progress against the targets. In brief, the current evaluation approach consists of:

• monitoring child poverty levels annually both for all, and for each of the priority family types most at risk of poverty
• annually monitoring the drivers of child poverty through the framework
• evaluating the impact of policies on child poverty, both individually and in combination
• gathering and analysing evidence on the priority groups through focus reports

In the latest evaluation strategy we committed to reviewing the reporting approach for priority family types. This report discusses the findings of this review. With the aim of supporting stakeholders working in child poverty policies, this report also explains how best to utilise the priority family concept and recommends actions for future analysis and reporting of issues faced by the priority groups.

Aim and approach of the review

The aim of this review is to report on the position of priority families in regards to available evidence, and data on the causes of poverty and effective measures to tackle it.

In order to meet this aim, we consider both the role of supporting qualitative evidence and information, and the contribution and availability of quantitative data.

Firstly, from a qualitative perspective, this report re-explores the concept of the priority family types looking back at why they were developed and how they were intended to be used. The report also summarises the current approach to reporting and available evidence on priority family types.

Secondly, to consider the availability of quantitative data, the review assessed data sources for each indicator part of the measurement framework, exploring frequency of data, demographic information, sample sizes and viability of sub samples. Lead analysts for each relevant survey reviewed the data used for each of the indicators to assess the viability of providing priority family breakdowns for these indicators.

Through the review, we identified more general issues or barriers to producing valid, reliable data at priority family level. For some indicators, some breakdowns are possible, however, the overall picture is inconsistent and regularly updating the entire framework for each of the priority groups is simply not possible. In any case, the overall usefulness of such an approach needs, also, to be considered.