Whole Family Wellbeing Funding (WFWF) - year 1 process evaluation: final report

1 Introduction

This is the final report from an evaluation of Elements 1 and 2 of the Scottish Government Whole Family Wellbeing Funding (WFWF) during its first year of operation (2022-2023). See Annex 3 for a glossary of terms.

Policy and legislative background and context

The Scottish Government wants to ensure that all children, young people and families have access to any help they need to grow, develop, and reach their full potential. ‘Getting it right for every child’ (GIRFEC) provides everyone in Scotland with a framework and shared understanding for promoting, supporting, and safeguarding the wellbeing of children and young people so that they grow up loved, safe and respected. The Scottish Government’s vision is for holistic whole family support to be readily available for families where and when they need it. GIRFEC underpins the Scottish Government’s ambition to Keep the Promise and create a country where more children will only know care, compassion and love, rather than a ‘care system’ (Scottish Government, 2022a).

The GIRFEC National Practice Model sets out a holistic whole family approach to providing support for children and young people, and their families, with the principle that wellbeing is about all areas of life, including family, community and society. This includes universal provision to support development and build resilience, and specialist and intensive help to address more complex needs. Holistic whole family provision focuses on joining up preventative and early intervention support for families across a range of community and national services provided by different organisations such as local agencies, individual practitioners and third sector partners.

Children’s Services Planning duties deliver Scotland’s strategic partnership approach to local multi-agency planning of services and support to improve outcomes for children, young people and families living in each area. Duties and key tasks over a 3-year cycle are set out in Part 3 of the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 and supporting statutory guidance. These aim to ensure a whole system approach is in place across public and third sector partners to: safeguard, support and promote wellbeing; shift resources to early intervention, and where possible, prevention; and to make best use of local assets, workforce and budgets across partners, with support to families at the core of this.

In 2020, a review of Scotland’s ‘care system’ for children and young people was completed by the Independent Care Review. A central part of the review involved listening to the views of care experienced children and young people, and their families, in order to put together evidence to underpin the legislation, practices, culture and ethos of the care system, as well as to explore how Scotland could improve the support available.

The review’s findings indicated that a significant upscale of family support was required. As a result, Scotland’s then First Minister pledged that Scotland would ‘Keep the Promise’ (The Care Review, 2020a). The Promise outlined key outcomes that aimed to ensure that Scotland’s children and young people grow up loved, safe and respected. The commitment to the Promise was set out alongside the 2021-2024 Plan (The Care Review, 2020b), which outlined how change must happen, and made whole family support a priority. Part of the response to the Plan, set out in the Scottish Government’s Programme for Government 2021-2022, included the WFWF (Scottish Government, 2021a).

WFWF supports Scottish Government’s commitment to respect, protect and fulfil children’s human rights across Scotland. By providing holistic rights-based support that delivers the help children and their families need, when they need it, WFWF aims to support families to flourish and reduce the chances of family breakdown and children entering the care system.

The ambitions of The Promise and the WFWF are situated within the context of ongoing recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, which greatly impacted the health, education, and income of families, and worsened systemic inequalities. Among other aims, the 2021 Covid Recovery Strategy (Scottish Government, 2021b) set out the vision for Scotland to improve the wellbeing of children and young people through development and delivery of activities to increase holistic whole family support, also drawing on findings from the analysis and review of Children’s Services Plans^[4]. These included: changes to commissioning and procurement of family support, supporting Children’s Services Planning Partnerships (CSPPs^[5]) to scale up and develop new family support, and establishing consistent standards and evaluation tools.

About Whole Family Wellbeing Funding

The Scottish Government’s Programme for Government 2021-22 committed to invest £500 million in Whole Family Wellbeing Funding (WFWF) over the course of the parliament (2022-2026). The aim was to transform the way family support was delivered, so that families could access the help they needed, where and when they needed it.

This aim was part of a wider goal to reduce the need for crisis intervention in families, and to shift investment towards prevention and early intervention.^[6] The funding had an emphasis on support for child mental health, poverty, alcohol and drug misuse and educational attainment.

The aim of WFWF was to facilitate the delivery of holistic family support with the expectation this would improve and reduce inequalities in family wellbeing, reduce requirements for family crisis intervention, and reduce the number of children and young people living away from their families. It is anticipated that WFWF will help to address the challenges of child poverty, by ensuring that families can access the help they need for as long as they need it. There was recognition here that support for broader family wellbeing was an important driver in helping families in poverty or at risk of poverty.

The longer-term ambition of the WFWF was that holistic whole family support would be available to every family who needed it. However, the immediate focus was on supporting those families judged by the CSPP to be most in need. For example, the six priority family types identified in the Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan (Scottish Government, 2022b) and to support the children, young people, and families who were known to be at risk of being taken into care.

The six priority family types included: lone parent families, the large majority of which are headed by women; families which included a disabled adult or child; larger families; minority ethnic families; families with a child under one year old; and families where the mother was under 25 years of age.

The WFWF was split into three elements, with this Year 1 evaluation focusing on Element 1 and 2:

• Element 1: Funding provided to CSPPs to support the scale up and delivery of holistic whole family support in local areas. This funding could also be used to build local capacity for achieving transformational change in how families are supported. For example, this could include recruiting a small team to support the CSPP plan for this funding or buying in additional transformational expertise to support leadership discussions.
• Element 2^[7]: Support to build local capacity for transformational system change in how families are supported. This included:

a) collaborative partnerships between a Scottish Government-led transformation team and three CSPPs (East Ayrshire, Glasgow City and East Lothian) to drive whole system change in family support at the local and national level. The partnerships worked through a structured process to accelerate practical learning about the national and local systemic change required to deliver holistic family support.

b) a Learning into Action Network to facilitate collaboration, sharing of learning and approaches, discussions on key implementation issues and peer support. The Learning into Action Network is co-designed and co-delivered with stakeholders to enable collaboration, facilitate peer support, share learning and approaches from across the country, and support solution-focused discussions around the barriers to whole system change. CSPPs have utilised this network to develop their initial plans (the documentation CSPPs provided setting out how they intended to spend their WFWF allocation for 2022-23 including information on CSPPs’ existing approach to holistic whole family support, planned activity for WFWF, anticipated outcomes for the first year, and intended monitoring activities) and delivery of WFWF activities.

• Element 3: Providing funding to support a cross-portfolio approach to system change through new, Scottish Government-led national policy projects that will help transform how families are supported. The projects will contribute to the ambitions and outcomes of WFWF, in line with the National Principles of Holistic Whole Family Support (Scottish Government, 2022c). Annex 2 contains the full list of National Principles.

Year 1 of the WFWF also focussed on the exploration and understanding of children’s services as a ‘complex system’. This recognises that the system is made up of diverse, interacting actors, and parts that learn from one another, and one which can have outcomes that are challenging to assess. As such, it is vital that holistic family support and, in turn, this evaluation, are alert and responsive to the dynamic nature of the policy and practice context.

Whole Family Wellbeing Funding logic model

A logic model was developed by Scottish Government, in consultation with stakeholders, to underpin the planning and delivery of funding and the evaluation. IFF reviewed and recommended refinements to strengthen its use for informing the evaluation, and future evaluations. The full model, including how elements relate to the core components of holistic whole family support (set out by Scottish Government), is presented in Annex 4.

A logic model is a visual representation of how the funding is intended to impact its beneficiaries (CSPPs and children, young people, and families). The logic model captures the ultimate impacts WFWF intends to have on beneficiaries, including the sequence of events expected to lead to short-term outcomes that together, if achieved, are expected to lead to the impacts. It summarises the rationale for providing the funding and shows some of the mechanisms by which change might come about.

The logic model is divided into sections (assumptions, inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes) and broadly describes what kinds of changes are expected. The logic model acknowledges, in the underlying assumptions, that each of the CSPPs will have different priorities for the funding and will be at a different stage in their planning and delivery journeys. Likewise, activities, outputs, and early outcomes and progress towards these by the end of Year 1 will differ between CSPPs. A brief description of the activities, outputs and outcomes of the model within scope of the 2022-23 evaluation are reported below.

Activities

Activities at the local level include activities planned under Elements 1, 2 and 3 delivered through CSPPs and partners (this evaluation focused on Element 1 and 2 only). Some activities proposed in the logic model are expected of all CSPPs, and some are related to CSPPs with specific aims for their activity (exploratory, transforming, or scaling).

Activities relevant to all CSPPs are to:

• Engage with a wide range of children, young people, and families on service design;
• Identify support for needs assessment, system analysis and change planning;
• Plan for and procure support/recruiting staff to scale up and/or deliver plans; and.
• Deliver training and upskilling of new or existing workforce.

Other activities related to particular CSPPs in terms of the type of support they are aiming to undertake as part of the WFWF, related to the maturity matrix in Section 5:

• Exploratory: plan for and identify pilot programmes and complete local assessment of needs and develop plans for system change.
• Transforming: identify and plan for family support with an early intervention and preventative focus and identify and plan for improving access to support for children, young people and families.
• Scaling: begin to scale up local transformative and effective approaches to service delivery.

Activities also included those supported by Scottish Government at a national level including Element 2 and 3 activities, and contributions to support this evaluation.

Outputs

The outputs specified in the model include:

• CSPPs planning for and developing mechanisms to enhance participation of children, young people, and families in service design.
• Beginning to test new system approaches to family support.
• Establishing processes to gather regular volunteered feedback on services from children, young people, and families.
• Expanding the use of locally based multi-agency services co-ordinating support.
• Identifying what good practice is and it being used by other CSPPs and partners.
• Reporting mechanisms becoming more streamlined, accessible and less bureaucratic.

Outcomes

The logic model proposed 11 outcomes for the WFWF where some evidence of early progress may be available by the end of Year 1. These outcomes can be broadly split into four categories based on the core components of holistic family support, though there is some overlap between them. The core components and associated outcomes are:

• Children and families at the centre of design – A children’s rights-based approach to improved Family Wellbeing, with services designed with children, young people and their families’ needs at the centre, supporting all families to flourish and thrive. Outcomes include:
  • Meaningful and ongoing participation by children, young people and families in service design, which ensures choice and control.
  • CSPPs begin embedding the key principles for holistic whole family support within their own systems and structures.
• Availability and access – All families know how to, and are able to access multi-sectoral, holistic, whole family support. Outcomes include:
  • CSPPs start to redesign/design delivery of new whole family support services, including removing barriers for children, young people and families accessing support.
  • Improved points of access to services in communities.
• Whole system approach – A collaborative, multi-agency and multi-disciplinary approach to the funding, commissioning and delivery of family support. Outcomes include:
  • Feedback on children’s services informing planning and delivery of adult and related services.
  • Non-siloed, aligned, and proportionate family support funding that matches scale of need.
  • Local investment in planning of system change.
  • More collaborative work across CSPPs partners and with adult services.
• Leadership, workforce, and culture – Cross-sectoral commitment to collaboration and innovation which empowers and supports the workforce to provide holistic whole family support. Outcomes include:
  • Increased whole family support service capacity, and scaled and new services are integrated.
  • Empowerment for innovation.
  • Development of holistic workforce approach.

Proposed longer term outcomes are included in the full logic model which covers the whole period of the WFWF implementation, however these were beyond the scope of this evaluation.