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

Recommendations

IFF Research’s conclusions and recommendations from the evaluation for the Scottish Government and CSPPs to consider are summarised below:

1. For Scottish Government: Improve access to available professional support for children’s services practitioners, for example through the KHub (an online, knowledge sharing platform), and encourage shared learning across CSPPs. This would be useful, for example, for the development and use of effective methods for assessing achievement of outcomes related to core components that are more challenging to evidence, and for implementing new ways of commissioning and procuring services.

2. For Scottish Government: Continue to work together with CSPPs to plan for long-term financial and operational sustainability of holistic and transformative family support, beyond the lifetime of the funding.

3. For CSPPs: Improve the visibility of support to both families and partners, to help families access the right support at the right time. Improving the functionality and alignment of different case management systems could support this.

4. For CSPPs and Scottish Government: When possible and appropriate for individual areas’ local situations, leaders and managers should consider how to address challenges with recruitment and retention by applying strategies from other CSPPs (ensuring this does not negatively impact other CSPPs). This could include alternatives such as aligning WFWF with additional funding sources, secondments or job sharing, and values-based recruitment. Recruitment and retention issues are a national problem that extends beyond the WFWF. As such, there is a need for Scottish Government and CSPPs to work together to seek solutions.

5. For CSPPs: CSPP leadership should review how well holistic family support can adapt to the changing needs of families. The more embedded a whole system approach becomes, the better CSPPs will be at identifying changes to the support needs of families and the operating context of the services provided in their area. Maintaining flexibility and adaptability within the system will be important to respond to these changes.

6. For CSPPs: Continue to establish systems for capturing regular feedback and engaging in ongoing consultation with partners across the CSPP to inform transformative family support. Importantly, ensure children, young people and families can see how their input and feedback influences service design (i.e., ‘closing the feedback loop’).

7. For Scottish Government and CSPPs: Continue to gather data and evidence to understand and showcase the progress and performance of WFWF activities and outcomes achieved (particularly for outcomes related to the core components of whole systems approach and leadership, workforce and culture), as well as developing CSPPs’ analytical capacity to interpret and use data within strategic decision-making.

Section 9 of the full report provides more details on the recommendations summarised above.