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

1. Introduction

Eradicating child poverty is a key priority for the Scottish Government. The second Tackling Poverty Delivery Plan, Best Start, Bright Futures (BSBF) acknowledges the complexity within the current support system and the need to work in different ways to ensure join up and alignment across the child poverty system. In particular, BSBF sets out the need to understand how well the system is working for families and outlines an approach to understand the cumulative impact of policies in the child poverty context. The evaluation of system change initiatives to tackle child poverty aims to understand the effectiveness of system change, place-based initiatives in tackling child poverty.

The baseline report found that maximising the reach of initiatives and ensuring accessibility for ‘hard to reach’ and other marginalised families was an ongoing challenge. In particular, the report noted the need for further consideration of those from the six priority family groups – lone parents; mothers under 25; minority ethnic families; families with three or more children; families with a baby under one; and families with a child or adult with a disability – and those facing multiple and intersecting disadvantages.

Research aims

The overarching aim of this report is to draw key learnings for policy makers on engaging with families living in poverty across system change, place-based initiatives.

The following three research questions have guided this research.

1. What are the enablers and barriers to successful engagement with families living in poverty / low-income households? This includes from service design, implementation to service delivery and evaluation.

2. To what extent have underreached families (this includes priority families, but also individuals/families with other equality characteristics) been engaged in system change, place-based initiatives? This includes from service design, implementation to service delivery and evaluation.

3. What lessons have been learned which may help us to engage families living in low-income households in service design, implementation, delivery and evaluation?

Research approach

Eight initiatives were selected to be in scope for this research project. These are initiatives which have been included in the early learnings from the wave one of the system change evaluation. These include:

• Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund
• Dundee Pathfinder
• Glasgow Pathfinder
• Family Wellbeing Partnership
• No One Left Behind
• School Age Childcare
• Whole Family Wellbeing Funding
• Learnings from the Anchor for Families Project

The analysis in this report is based on:

• Published evidence on place-based, system change initiatives from policy and analytical teams in Scottish Government. Reports were reviewed to identify evidence relating to family engagement across projects.
• Interviews with relevant Scottish Government policy and analytical colleagues.^[1] In total, eight interviews were completed, comprising 16 individuals from across seven policy initiatives.

Report outline

Firstly, this report outlines how we defined key concepts as part of our research approach. This overview defines system change, a place-based approach and engagement in the context of this report and adopted research approach.

Then, the report provides an overview of the enablers to successful engagement with families living in low-income households. This provides insights into the value of staffing, partnership working, accessible, flexible and responsive services, establishing trust across relationships, and co-designing services.

The report moves on to consider the barriers to successful engagement with families, particularly accessibility, stigma, the recruitment and retention of staff, data sharing and fear of a loss of household income.

The report then considers the extent to which underreached families have been engaged to date across system change, place-based initiatives to tackle child poverty.

Finally, conclusions are offered which summarise the key themes and learnings from the report findings.