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

5. Conclusions and considerations

Introduction

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 the whole system, transformational change is required to reduce the need for crisis intervention, and to shift investment towards prevention and early intervention. WFWF in the financial year 2022-2023 focused on supporting capacity building at local and national level; supporting the scaling up of existing transformational practice and demonstrating positive impacts for families.

This report has discussed the early journey of change of CSPPs since receiving funding, and early evidence of implementation in respect to fund administration, and the design and set-up of funded activities.

Progress to date

The implementation of the WFWF has had some early successes and provides a solid platform on which to progress during the remainder of the funding period. CSPPs value having access to the WFWF and praised its flexibility to be adapted to their local needs. CSPPs have successfully managed to develop their initial plans at pace and have started the set-up and development work needed to make their visions a reality. The evaluation also found evidence of high levels of satisfaction with the support offered to CSPPs by the Scottish Government, particularly the WFWF leads' timely and informative responses, and the value of the newsletter and national learning network events.

Strategic leads and managers reported a collaborative and multidisciplinary approach to developing initial plans, with consultations with CSPP partners and the third sector forming an important part of the decision-making process. To a slightly lesser extent, CSPPs involved children, young people, and families, and undertook analysis of existing data to inform how the WFWF is spent locally. Those CSPPs who did not already have active channels for children, young people, and families' engagement, or who lacked access to data, or the resource needed for analysis, reported the quick timeframes for developing the initial plan as a barrier to doing this more comprehensively. Some CSPPs also found it difficult to gain consensus and align priorities about WFWF amongst third sector partners during the design stage.

The review of initial plans for spending WFWF showed the great variation across CSPPs, in both detail and types of activities within the plans. This often reflected the stage of their implementation journey. Unsurprisingly, those who had not begun their transformational journey were most likely to have limited detail on the nature and scope of their activity.

Most CSPPs identified recruitment as a priority for Year 1, including filling new posts to develop and deliver WFWF activities. Recruitment has, though, been an almost universal challenge. Strategic leads and managers largely attribute this to factors outside of the funding: the economic climate the CSPPs are operating in and the high demand for staff within and beyond the sector being key. The temporary nature of the funding has also contributed to delays in recruitment, as hiring teams work with legal teams to determine what contract types are best suited for positions funded by a fund that is time limited.

Four of the six case study areas for this evaluation have progressed to delivering services to children, young people, and families, and provided early anecdotal evidence of positive outcomes for children, young people, and families (e.g., improved family relationships, improved family access to a range of community services, and reduced need for escalation to statutory services).

Considerations

As a process evaluation running in parallel to the development and delivery of WFWF, early insights can help improve and enhance WFWF during its delivery. Based on the evidence in CSPPs' initial plans, and the discussions with case study strategic leads and managers, the IFF team offer the following considerations and opportunities for how the Scottish Government and CSPPs can continue to work collaboratively together to deliver the vision of the WFWF. These considerations reflect evidence gathered to date from the evaluation and therefore should be considered along within this context of the early stages of the WFWF. The final report will include recommendations for the future development of the funding.

CSPPs and the Scottish Government are encouraged to work together to:

• Support CSPPs to explore the sustainability of their WFWF activity and plan longer-term spending, beyond the funding payment milestones.
• Continue to find ways for CSPPs to share knowledge, good practice and learning with each other from their WFWF activity. Examples of topics this could cover that would be welcomed by CSPPs include:
  • Ways of engaging with third sector partners and the channels/forums CSPPs and third sector partners find mutually useful;
  • Ideas and solutions to support with recruitment challenges, including around hiring staff using time-limited WFWF;
  • Ideas about how to assess the quality of their data and the ways they could use it to inform their monitoring, practically and relative to their capacity for doing so.
• Continue discussions between the Scottish Government and CSPPs about the information CSPPs would value most about the WFWF (e.g., timescales for future funding), and about how and when this can best be communicated to meet CSPP needs. Communication needs to continue to be flexible and timely.
• Continue to work together to support CSPPs to articulate their intended outcomes of the WFWF. This would be a useful step before then considering how best to measure these with either existing evidence or through new evidence collection.

Evidencing the logic model and research questions

The interim evaluation has found evidence that CSPPs are largely delivering the intended activity as outlined in the logic model. This includes engaging children, young people, and families in designing WFWF activity, designing and starting to implement transformative approaches to delivering holistic whole family support, and using local assessments of need to inform approaches. Recruitment of staff into posts to deliver WFWF activities remains a risk to achieving the Year 1 outcomes if roles remain vacant.

Interim analysis of evidence from CSPPs identified topics to focus on in the remainder of the evaluation of Year 1:

• The funding was due to be distributed to CSPPs at the end of the 2022-2023 financial year. This means that gathering strategic leads' views on the mechanisms for receiving the funding has not been captured within this interim report and will be covered during the rest of the evaluation.
• The initial views of strategic leads and managers on Element 2 have been captured in this report, yet interviewing took place before Element 2 plans were fully developed. The rest of the evaluation will focus on how CSPPs involved in Element 2 plan to align activity with Element 1.
• Engaging third sector partners and children, young people, and families are key requirements of WFWF. This report covered how both groups were consulted and engaged in decision-making around initial funding decisions. The evaluation will look to capture evidence of the role and involvement of these groups in ongoing delivery of WFWF activity going forward.
• CSPPs are expected to show progress towards short-term outcomes outlined in the WFWF logic model within Year 1 of the funding. Where possible, the evaluation will identify outcomes observed (including unintended outcomes/consequences), and factors influencing the progress towards these short-term outcomes.

Evaluation next steps

From April 2023, additional evaluation activity will involve:

• A focus group with frontline staff (including those working in the third sector where relevant) working in each of the six case studies. These groups will gather examples of short-term outcomes, the mechanisms of change and practical lessons learned for bringing about outcomes and sustaining benefits.
• Four to six interviews with children, young people and/or families in each of the six case studies, depending on the nature of WFWF-funded support. These interviews will aim to understand the experiences of children, young people and families with WFWF-funded activity to date, including consultation on initial plans.
• Twelve interviews with strategic leads or managers leading on WFWF activities in each of the six case studies, following-up on interviews conducted at the start of the evaluation. These interviews will have a similar focus to focus groups with frontline staff and build on the interviews undertaken to date.
• Analysis of CSPP WFWF annual reports submitted by all CSPPs (not just case study CSPPs) to the Scottish Government by the deadline.

The final report will build on the interim report, drawing on all of above data to provide a complete picture of implementation of Year 1 of the WFWF. The final report will be delivered to the Scottish Government in winter 2023, with publication likely to be in early 2024.