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

8 Conclusions and recommendations

The Scottish Government’s vision is for holistic family support, with early intervention and prevention at its core, to be readily available to families that need it. WFWF was established to help support whole system, transformational change. This was in line with the aim of reducing the need to intervene at the point of crisis for families, and to shift investment towards prevention and early intervention.

In the 2022-2023 financial year, Element 1 WFWF funding was provided to CSPPs to support the scale up and delivery of holistic whole family support which addresses the needs of children and adults in a family at the time of need rather than at crisis point. Element 2 support was intended to build local capacity for transformational system change in how families are supported.

This final report from the evaluation of Year 1 of the WFWF has discussed the early journey of change of CSPPs since receiving funding; evidence of implementation in respect of fund administration; the design and set-up of funded activities; and progress towards early outcomes.

CSPPs and their partners, with support from Scottish Government, have engaged well with the ambitions of WFWF in Year 1. Substantial progress has been made within and across most CSPPs, as evidenced by their reported progress between their initial plans and annual reports. However, some activities key to bringing about early outcomes in the logic model are outstanding in some CSPPs. This will likely prevent some CSPPs from achieving the intended early outcomes by the end of Year 2. For CSPPs to progress with WFWF implementation and ensure the foundations are in place to achieve intended WFWF outcomes, Scottish Government and CSPPs should continue to focus on:

1) Mobilising the necessary workforce across the CSPPs to deliver local WFWF plans, embedding the whole family support principles (see Annex 2), and upskilling the workforce with the analytical skills required for whole system monitoring and evidence-based decision making.

2) Collaborating and relationship building within and across CSPPs. This is particularly important regarding the development of a clear, strategic vision for approaching system change and establishing a clear understanding of how this is going to happen as a result of WFWF.

3) Establishing systems for capturing regular feedback and engaging in ongoing consultation with partners across the CSPP, as well as children, young people, and families, to inform transformative family support.

4) Gathering data and evidence to understand progress and performance of WFWF activities and outcomes achieved and developing the analytical capacity to interpret and use the data within strategic decision-making.

Conclusions and recommendations related to each evaluation aim are discussed below.

Scottish Government approach to funding, allocation, distribution, and support

CSPPs embraced Scottish Government's flexible funding approach, allowing them to tailor their WFWF activities to local needs and collaborate with partners. This approach gave CSPPs the flexibility to use WFWF funds to complement other funding streams’ activities, and combine, where appropriate.

CSPP leads found the initial plans required to access funds straightforward to complete. In nearly all case study areas, a key principle of developing the plan was collaboration, including with children, young people, and families and third sector partners. This is discussed in more detail in the section below.

Although leads in the case study CSPPs valued the dedicated support from Scottish Government’s WFWF leads, they would welcome more opportunities to understand what other CSPPs are doing in relation to delivery of holistic whole family support. They would also value direction or advice from Scottish Government on the sustainability of their whole family support, beyond the WFWF’s 2026 funding period.

Recommendations:

For Scottish Government: Continue to facilitate ways for CSPPs to share knowledge, good practice and learning from their WFWF activity with each other. This could build on recently established forums (Knowledge Hub established in July 2023 and Learning into Action Network sessions delivered from early 2023, with a dedicated coordinator in place from August 2023). Useful topics for coverage would be ways to ensure key staff are in place, building relationships with the third sector, and engaging children, young people and family in delivery.

For Scottish Government: Scottish Government to continue to work with CSPPs to support them to build the sustainability of their WFWF activities and plan longer term spending, beyond the funding payment milestones. This could be incorporated into the ongoing discussions Scottish Government WFWF leads have with CSPPs and tailored to the individual needs/concerns of the CSPP. It may also usefully be linked to wider discussions between Scottish Government and CSPPs as part of Children’s Services Planning processes. Useful topics of coverage could include mechanisms for moving from ‘projects’ to business as usual, including workforce and capacity and financial considerations. Sustainability should also be considered in the broader context, including considerations of other funding streams, to ensure that a longer-term plan for whole family support is being considered by CSPPs beyond WFWF.

Approaches to designing and planning priorities and activity

Evidence shows that WFWF activities focussed on holistic family support tailored to family needs, such as delivering frontline practitioner-led support, through either one-to-one or group activities, with families.

Most CSPPs provided updates on activities in their CSP annual reports that aligned with the WFWF criteria and aims, emphasising early intervention and prevention family support. Where CSPPs decided to focus WFWF on responsive support (rather than early intervention and prevention), this was because of the findings from local needs analysis and children, young people and families input indicating a more pressing need and demand for intensive and crisis support.

Most case study CSPPs did not specify any target beneficiaries or did not plan to support particular groups (only five of 21 were undertaking activities specifically focussed on certain groups). This was because they intended their WFWF activity to provide accessible support that was more adaptable to the changing needs of the community based on individual assessment.

Although all case study CSPPs were aware of the need for collaboration and engagement with children, young people and families, integrating this within WFWF delivery has not happened consistently across all CSPPs. CSPPs engaged with children, young people and families when developing their initial plans but ongoing consultation on service design was rare. Barriers to ongoing collaboration included staff capacity and capabilities, effort required by families, and complex family needs. Small consultation groups and simple surveys were effective. Frontline practitioners reported that smaller informal group sessions were received well by parents because they felt more comfortable to be open and share their particular needs that they would like addressed by service delivery.

All CSPPs engaged with third sector partners, though the extent of this engagement and its success varied. The pace of WFWF implementation was faster where strong partnerships with third sector partners already existed. Lack of collaboration between third sector organisations in some areas had also limited the pace of WFWF activity implementation for some CSPPs. This was particularly the case where relationships were newer, and amongst smaller third sector organisations who at times were thought to have had more limited knowledge of how the wider family support system worked. Case study strategic leads and local WFWF leads suggested that third sector organisations also faced difficulty when trying to integrate with other services due to their commissioning cycle. They also indicated that there was more work required by CSPPs to ensure that third sector organisations had the knowledge of the holistic whole family support system to engage.

Recommendations:

For CSPPs: CSPPs should establish systems for regularly and formally capturing feedback from, and undertaking engagement with, children, young people and families.

For CSPPs: Strategic leads and local WFWF leads should utilise tools produced by the Scottish Government (e.g. self assessment toolkit produced to support WFWF planning) to look to improve third sector collaboration into Year 2. These activities should enable CSPPs to draw more strongly on the expertise and knowledge of the third sector in their future collaboration as part of the WFWF.

Implementation and delivery of WFWF to date

A key enabler of WFWF implementation was focusing on expanding existing successful activities. Where an activity was deemed successful pre-WFWF, WFWF funding was helpful in its expansion. CSPPs assessed activities as successful based on children, young people and families’ feedback, and tangible measures of children, young people and families’ outcomes such as increases in school attendance.

CSPPs have found it difficult to progress at the pace envisioned by the Scottish Government for Year 1 implementation. Barriers to implementation at speed varied depending on the starting point for a CSPP and ranged from operational capacity and capabilities; organisational culture of system change; ability to meaningfully engage diverse partners and families; and the lack of functionality and agility of monitoring systems for systems analysis and change planning. Taken together, the Year 1 evidence suggests the culture change and systems needed for family support transformation needs more time to become established before CSPPs observe early outcomes.

Operational capacity was further affected by the time-limited nature of the funding, which had a substantial impact on progress made as many CSPPs struggled to fill required posts. This included concerns that the funding will not continue until or after 2026, and that the period of time until 2026 is relatively short to achieve the ambitious outcomes set out in the WFWF logic model.

It is a positive sign that interviewed children, young people and families expressed appreciation towards how WFWF activity had been delivered. The approach taken by frontline practitioners (including being friendly and relatable), the perception of practitioners being distinct from social workers, and support being provided in an engaging manner were all key in generating positive feedback.

Recommendations:

For CSPPs: Where possible, look to achieve recruitment priorities through lessons learned from this evaluation, such as offering staffing contracts that extend beyond the scope of the funding. If that is not feasible, other options include considering secondments or job sharing within or across neighbouring CSPPs. This should be set within the context of the ambition that WFWF activity becomes business as usual following the end of the funding and reflects the wider contextual situation within Scotland and local areas.

For Scottish Government: In terms of the perception about the temporary and short-term nature of the funding, Scottish Government should work with CSPPs, within the confines of what is possible, to provide reassurance about funding allocations until the end of the funding period. As per the recommendation above, work to help CSPPs plan for sustainability should also be undertaken.

Monitoring WFWF delivery

It is a positive sign that all CSPPs have identified indicators to monitor performance of their WFWF activity, at least to some extent, and that CSPPs have made progress with this across Year 1. All CSPPs were also undertaking development work to understand the monitoring indicators they would use to evidence the outcomes of their WFWF activity. However, data collection relating to outcomes was less widely progressed than data collection relating to performance monitoring. This likely reflects the stage of WFWF implementation.

The main priority for further development remains around analysis and interpretation of data collected. There are still varying levels of confidence among CSPPs in how to use the data they had collected to drive strategic decision making. CSPPs with more advanced analytical capabilities had pre-existing data and performance groups to manage data collection and establish its use in their planning and strategy.

Going forward, most leads in case study CSPPs expressed ambition to use the data collected to shape their WFWF support offer in a more formal and structured way. The box below captures suggestions for how the Scottish Government could support CSPPs with this as they look to evidence outcomes in Year 2.

Recommendations:

For Scottish Government: CSPPs would benefit from Scottish Government support to help them understand their current capabilities, and how they could develop their knowledge and skill around data analysis, interpretation and how to use this in decision-making. This should start by collecting detailed insight from CSPPs about areas of priority and how this support could be best delivered (e.g. format, timescales, frequency etc.). Scottish Government should also ensure that support for this is coordinated and not duplicated across different Scottish Government policies and programmes that interact with CSPPs. Support should also be specific and tailored to each CSPP’s needs and point in their monitoring and evaluation journey.

For Scottish Government: As outlined in Section 2, one of the limitations of this evaluation resulted from the variable completeness and quality of the CSP annual report information CSPPs provided in relation to their WFWF activity. To improve the quality of data available for future evaluation work, feedback should first be gathered from CSPPs about their experience of completing the WFWF reporting and understand what additional support could help CSPPs to complete this going forward. Once feedback has been collected, consideration should be given to encouraging comprehensiveness of information provided, including around capturing spend on activities delivered. Any amends to reporting processes should recognise the broader context of a drive towards proportionate reporting and CSPP accountability.

For CSPPs: CSPPs should consider ways to build capacity for data analysis, for example recruitment of data analysts as needed. This would help confirm what data should be collected to support investment based on preventative and wellbeing outcomes, and to ensure the contribution of the WFWF to achieving outcomes is able to be effectively evidenced.

Perceptions of progress towards early outcomes

The WFWF logic model outlined 11 early outcomes the Scottish Government expected to see some evidence of by the end of Year 1. Progress towards these outcomes varied across CSPPs, mainly because of the differences in the activities undertaken and maturity of projects. There are some CSPPs who showed almost no progress towards any of the intended early outcomes, whilst others showed progress across several outcomes. This position is not unsurprising given the delays to implementation progress and the challenges with delivery (e.g. recruitment) experienced by some CSPPs. It will be a focus of the Year 2 evaluation to explore outcomes achieved and understand the evidence available for this.

Where evidence was available for early outcomes, it is important to emphasise that most CSPPs had limited evidence to indicate achievement of these outcomes. There was early evidence of CSPPs moving towards non-siloed and aligned whole family support funding that matches the scale of need, and CSPPs beginning to redesign new whole family support services that meet the needs of children, young people and families.

Recommendations:

For CSPPs: CSPPs should ensure they have clearly defined outcomes for their WFWF activities, and that these clearly align with the intended outcomes/priorities of the WFWF, as captured in the logic model. This will be especially important in terms of early intervention and prevention support, and how best to assess the outcomes of this activity with either existing evidence or through collecting new evidence.