Engaging with families living in low-income households through system change, place-based initiatives

Executive Summary

Background

Eradicating child poverty is a key priority for Scottish Government. The second Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, Best Start, Bright Futures, acknowledges how complex the support system for families living in low income can be and it outlines commitments to improving this system and ensuring it works for families. In particular, the Plan committed to a number of actions and initiatives focused on delivering this ‘system change’ and testing different approaches to providing person-centred solutions for families in poverty.

The evaluation of system change initiatives to tackle child poverty aims to provide learnings on how the child poverty system is working for families. Early evidence from the evaluation showed a gap in knowledge around engagement with underreached families.

This report explores the enablers and barriers to successful engagement with families living in low-income households across system change, place-based initiatives. The extent to which underreached families have been reached by initiatives is also considered, while key learnings from across the report are drawn together to highlight areas of importance when engaging with families across system change, place-based initiatives.

For the purposes of this report, engagement is defined as the involvement of families, adults and/or children and young people, in the design, implementation, delivery or evaluation of the initiative.

Key Findings

What are the enablers of successful engagement with families?

Staffing. The keyworker approach adopted across initiatives is particularly valuable in providing a trusted point of contact, alongside holistic and person-centred support.

Partnership working. Collaborative working across local authorities, third sector partners and multiple agencies can help to deliver services that work for families and provide them with wraparound, holistic support. A single point of access can be valuable in initial engagement with families and reduces barriers to accessing services.

Accessibility. There is value in placing services in communities rather than in centralised locations. Co-location of services also allows for ease of access and can reduce the stigma of accessing services, while also normalising services.

Flexible services. The ability to offer flexible, responsive and tailored support is crucial in providing holistic support and ensuring engagement with families. This entails listening to the needs of families and providing support services that fit their needs.

Trust. Building trust is a fundamental enabler to engagement and extends across all levels of the system. All relationship building takes time and it is important to ensure adequate time is given to allow for a consistent and considered approach. Building trust can be crucial in engaging families who have not yet engaged with services before.

Co-design. To varying degrees, participation in design and delivery is occurring across all initiatives. Co-design is a particularly collaborative approach that involves multiple stakeholders who come together to design and develop initiatives.

What are the barriers to successful engagement with families?

Accessibility. For the most part, accessibility was considered and acted as an enabler of engagement. However, when it is not fully considered, it can act as a barrier.

Stigma. Poverty stigma is complex and deeply engrained. A previous negative experience can be a barrier for engagement, and partnership working. To minimise stigma, drawing on the trusted relations between third sector organisations and local communities was seen to be invaluable. There are examples of initiatives and services taking innovative approaches e.g. setting up a café, open door policies. These can help to reach people who have had little or negative previous contact with services. Further, language can play an important role in reducing stigma. It is advisable for services to use accessible, non-labelling, stigmatising language across their services.

Recruitment and retention of staff. Recruiting and retaining staff to work on short-term, fixed-term (limited to funding periods) contracts can be problematic. Working across partners to fill posts with individuals holding the necessary knowledge, experience and skills can help to fill recruitment gaps.

Data sharing. Data sharing is a key barrier to engaging families. Data sharing can help to identify and target families most in need of assistance. However, evidence in this report suggests data sharing is an on-going challenge and is an area for further consideration to maximise reach of initiatives.

Fear of loss of household income. For some families, a fear of cuts to benefits can be a barrier to accessing support. This is a particularly pertinent challenge in the current economic climate where families may be facing compounding disadvantage. This fear can prevent families from accessing and engaging with support. It is important to build trust, and provide accessible services, for these families so that they feel able to return to services when their situation changes.

To what extent are underreached families being reached?

Priority family groups are engaged with across initiatives. Some initiatives encountered challenges engaging minority ethnic families, with language and cultural barriers cited.

The importance of building trust between services and families and ensuring promotion of services is seen as key to ensuring engagement with other marginalised families at risk of poverty, such as families with non-working adults in the household.

However, trying to understand why families are not being reached, if they are not initially engaging with a service, can be a challenge. Further work is required in this area to better understand non-engagement.

What lessons have been learned?

There are key lessons which can guide those working to engage families living in low-income households across system change, place-based initiatives.

Taking time. To ensure the long lasting success of initiatives, all stakeholders should be involved in meaningful discussions (including families), and there should be an acceptance that it takes time to build trust and embed change. This needs to be accounted for in grant funding and monitoring outcomes.

Importance of local input in service design. Local communities should be able to participate in the development of services. This can be done to varying degrees considering the feasibility of the approach and referring to appropriate published guidance.

Value of staff. The key worker approach was particularly valued. Staff can be crucial to the success of initiatives and it is essential to support staff development, ensure sound understandings of core values and principles and allow time to support personalised and flexible engagement with individuals.

Challenges of data sharing. There is an array of challenges in data sharing across partnership working. Greater awareness on what is and what is not possible is required. From there, those working across initiatives can make steps to outline the key processes required to make it happen.

Fairer Futures Partnerships. Initiatives in this report are working to provide flexible, person-centred whole family support in a place-based way that works for local communities. These principles are found in the expansion of fairer futures partnerships which were outlined in the recent Programme for Government and is seen to be instrumental in eradicating child poverty. The report findings highlight the value of this approach when engaging families.

Conclusions

There is evidence across all initiatives of dedicated and successful work in engaging and maximising the reach of services for families living in low-income households. The diversity of initiatives in their level of engagement highlights how initiatives can adopt different approaches to provide individuals with opportunities to engage, and be engaged, across service design, implementation, delivery and evaluation.

However, many barriers for engagement are systemic issues, such as staff recruitment and retention, and poverty stigma. This highlights the need for system change initiatives to provide the building blocks to create long-lasting changes to structures and cultures.

Many of these initiatives are small-scale or in the early stages of implementation – and change takes time to embed and impacts for families will also take time to be seen.