Whole Family Wellbeing Funding (WFWF) Programme - year 2: process and impact evaluation - full report

Annex 8: considerations for updating WFWF logic model

This annex presents our light-touch review of the WFWF logic model at the end of the Year 2 evaluation and provides recommendations to Scottish Government for improving the model to ensure it is robust and fit-for-purpose. As the Promise progress report (Scottish Government, 2024a) outlined a commitment to future impact evaluation activity, it will be important to ensure there is a logic model that can adequately support future use of theory-based impact evaluation approaches (including contribution analysis).

Scottish Government have substantially developed the logic model since the start of the Year 1 evaluation, making it a more useful tool for both CSPPs and stakeholders to understand how the WFWF is intended to work, as well as more valuable for the purposes of evaluation. Our recommendations for further improving the element specific logic models are included below.

Children and families at the centre of service design

• Year 2 findings highlighted the importance of individual practitioners' capacity and capabilities to children, young people and family experiences and outcomes of WFWF support. There is also a potential risk of dependency on individual practitioners for ongoing support (i.e., families become reliant on certain practitioners for help and guidance). This suggests an important change mechanism that should be included in the logic model: ‘children, young people and families trust practitioners and the process to engage in service design.’
• CSPPs are struggling to make substantial progress with the output ‘Strategic leads, family support managers and practitioners plan for and develop means to enhance participation of children, young people and families’ in service design based on engagements’, which is limiting achievement of other outcomes in this element. It would be advised to review the inputs and activities (and associated mechanisms and causal chains) to help CSPPs and stakeholders understand how this is intended to be achieved.

Availability and access

• The Year 2 findings highlighted a shifting landscape in which the WFWF is operating. This included the cost-of-living crisis meaning CSPPs need more regular gap analysis of families not accessing services and to inform service design. This makes it important to consider refinements to the operating contexts of WFWF in the logic model. For example, the cost-of-living crisis requiring different uses of CSPP resources, which may influence children, young people and family outcomes.
• CSPPs face a challenge around ‘children, young people and families are aware of how to access relevant family support,’ meaning an important mechanism is CSPPs continuing to raise awareness of how local people can assess relevant support when they need it.

Whole systems approach

• Strategic leads and managers who participated in the Year 2 evaluation noted the importance of progressing/achieving other elements of WFWF before it is possible to make substantial progress on the whole systems component. With this in mind, the linkages between this component and the others could be more clearly outlined on the logic model.
• The Year 2 findings highlighted that the outcomes in this component were deemed unobtainable within the original WFWF timescales (i.e. by 2025-2026). This was primarily because it requires wholescale change that takes longer to set-up and embed (as well as requiring the embedding of other activities – see bullet point above). As the timescales have now been extended, it would be valuable to review the timescales for achieving outcomes in the logic model and consult with CSPPs and stakeholders to gather perspectives what is considered realistic.

Leadership, workforce & culture

• In Year 2, external factors continued to contribute to the ability of CSPPs to fill vacancies and sufficiently resource family support. This challenges the logic model assumptions about increased whole family support, which should be regularly reviewed.
• There is limited evidence from the Year 2 evaluation that ‘strategic leads, family support managers and practitioners implement initiatives to develop a culture in CSPPs that encourages and empowers them to develop innovative family support solutions’. In particular, practitioners felt unsure how it was intended that they innovate and feel empowered to make changes. It would be valuable to ensure there are clear mechanisms to achieve this outlined within the logic model.

Element 3

It would be valuable to review, and potentially refine, the current Element 3 logic model based on the findings from the Year 2 evaluation. For example, a number of outcomes not included in the logic model were identified as likely future outcomes in the Element 3 project reports. These included children, young people and families learning together; parental confidence in supporting children and young people’s learning and development increasing; and parents having opportunities to gain qualifications.