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

3. What enables successful engagement with families living in low-income households?

Key Messages

Across the eight initiatives the following enablers were identified as supporting engagement with families living in low-income households.

• Staffing of initiatives. The keyworker approach adopted across initiatives can be valuable in providing a trusted point of contact, alongside holistic and personcentred support. Staff were often from the local community, or held local knowledge, which supported them to understand the needs of the families in the community.
• 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 using feedback loops - 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.

This chapter of the report explores the enablers to successful engagement with families living in low-income households across system change, place-based initiatives. Eight key themes were identified and are discussed below, with examples drawn from the evidence to highlight practices and learnings to date.

Staffing of initiatives

Staff are highly valuable to engaging families across initiatives. Across the evidence, the role of staff in providing local knowledge, while being passionate and committed, was critical in driving initiatives forward. For the Dundee Pathfinder, there was value in staff being local to the community, which allowed for the insider knowledge of understanding the needs of the community, and led to staff being able to build trusting, strong relations with families. Additionally, in Shetland, the Anchor project attributes much of their success to the work of staff due to their attitudes, professionalism and commitment to the families engaging with the service.

The attitude and values that staff held were viewed to be crucial to engagement with families, with staff cited to hold attributes of: non-judgement; friendly; approachable; empathetic, and treating families with respect. This is complementary to their professional skills and knowledge to provide support and ability to tailor their package of support to the needs of the community. This was evident across the Early Adopter Communities of School Age Childcare where staff holding the right skills and knowledge to support children with additional support needs (ASN) meant that parents/carers felt safe to leave their children in these services knowing they would have a positive experience with staff skilled to meet their complex needs.

A key worker approach

Families also value the stickability of the “key worker” in the sense that the key worker – or the most appropriate worker – stayed with the individual/family throughout their journey and engagement with services. This was found across a range of initiatives, including the Anchor, Family Wellbeing Partnership, No One Left Behind, the Pathfinders and Whole Family Wellbeing Funding. The key worker takes a person centred approach to assess the holistic needs of an individual or the family. The key workers can then provide the service and/or signpost and support them with further referrals while being alongside the family through their journey. This role contributes to the culture of ‘no wrong door’ which refers to how a family should be supported to access the right support at the right time in a system which is easy to navigate. In the Family Wellbeing Partnership, practitioners work with families to build trusting relationships which provide families with confidence that the practitioners are acting upon their best interests. This approach is exemplified as ‘the right thing, at the right time, for the right reason’ with the person who best knows the family, supporting the family.

Across initiatives, there was evidence that once a key worker has built a relationship with the family, they are able to use this to support ongoing engagement, reduce the stress of engaging with various services and reduce the amount of times the family have to tell their story. In the Anchor evaluation this role was likened to a “professional friend” which highlights the breaking down of traditional barriers between families and service providers, but also illustrates the role of a keyworker in providing advocacy, brokering, support and a professional friendship for families living in poverty. Below, the case study highlights the value of the key worker approach in engaging with families across the Pathfinders in Dundee and Glasgow.

Case study spotlight: No Wrong Door: a holistic, person-centred approach to engaging families living in poverty

What does the initiative seek to achieve?

Across the Dundee and Glasgow Pathfinders, a key aim has been to develop a joined-up system which could be evidenced by a ‘no wrong’ door approach. This is defined as ‘regardless of where, how and why a person or family engages in the system, that interaction becomes the gateway to receiving holistic, consistent, and comprehensive support’ (Pathfinders Early Implementation Report).

In Glasgow this was delivered through a telephone service ‘Glasgow Helps’ and in Dundee this was delivered by outreach key workers in the community and workers based in the drop in hub. To do this key workers would ask parents/carers about their broader needs during initial conversations, while drawing on the partnership working across both Pathfinders, to introduce individuals to other services.

What has been learned?

This approach, through the ‘no wrong door’ principle and key worker approach, delivers person-centred and holistic support. For families experiencing this model their journey through the complex child poverty support system was made simpler through the support on offer. This approach means families have a key contact and do not need to repeat their story, while ensuring appropriate and prompt support.

However, this holistic approach was noted to be labour intensive and time consuming. For some organisations it was easier to manage based on their primary role and their funding structure.

The ‘no wrong door’ model is one step in joining up systems and enacting system change. This approach demands that staff hold knowledge of other relevant available services, have positive working relationships with other agencies and services in order to successfully support families and ensure appropriate and timely support.

Relevance for engaging with families living in low-income households

This model was valued by parents/carers as it made them feel less vulnerable when accessing support – they did not have to re-tell their story and re-assert their needs. This helped to contribute to a positive experience for parents/carers.

Further, in accessing support, the attitudes of staff, adopting person-centred values, were viewed as non-judgmental and empathetic. For many, this differed from prior attempts at accessing support where they had been made to feel stigmatised or ashamed.

Local knowledge

The local knowledge of staff, and key workers, was further identified to be a significant enabler of engagement. Staff across initiatives often lived in the local, or surrounding, area and/or held local knowledge of the area. This level of understanding of the local area – the strengths, challenges, and, frequently being a part of the local community itself – was key to establishing relationships with families. This highlights a particular value of a place-based approach as the strengths and resources that already exist in a local area can continue to benefit the area.

For the Family Wellbeing Partnership in Clackmannanshire there is an understanding across their work of not ‘doing’ things to people but changing how services are provided to support how local people want to resolve the issues being faced by their communities. This places emphasis on the value of local knowledge across the system – not just policy makers, service providers and staff, but also that from families with lived experience of their community.

Partnership working

The value of partnership working came through as a strong enabler across many of the initiatives. Partnership working is diverse as illustrated by the examples below.

For local authorities, working collaboratively with third sector partners to deliver services was key to ensuring engagement as these partners often had strong connections to the community and were seen to be a trusted organisation. The Extra Time Programme, a joint initiative between Scottish Government and the Scottish Football Association, to provide school age childcare, provides a strong example of working together to provide a service to meet the needs of local communities. Across the 31 programmes, each club sought to draw upon partnerships and cater to the needs of their local communities in order to provide a range of school age childcare activities (both termtime breakfast and after school clubs and holiday clubs) and opportunities for children’s families to engage in services to provide social support and more formal support in employability and further training opportunities. Through partnership working, some programmes were able to ensure that children living in low-income households were prioritised for meal provision and for food hampers. While other programmes found that partnerships were key to adding extra knowledge and expertise to their team and would help them target underreached groups who were currently not benefitting from the Programme.

For the Family Wellbeing Partnership, inter-departmental working was referenced to be reducing siloed working and supporting engagement with families. The increase in inter-departmental working meant families are being provided with holistic services, with staff knowledgeable about other services within the council and able to obtain advice and support from these colleagues or make internal referrals to ensure the needs of families are met. For families, this meant that their experience of support was more coordinated, joined up and simpler, which also enabled them to access a wider range of support.

In Midlothian Council, their Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund project entailed developing a peer researcher programme. Key to the success of the project was the Council working with a local third sector partner, who had established links with the community, a trusted reputation, and knowledgeable staff who were able to run with this initiative. This project not only relied on the partner to engage with a community, and draw on their expertise, but by training parents/carers with lived experience of poverty to conduct research, has the potential to overcome barriers to, and maximise, engagement.

Additionally, a ‘no wrong door’ approach was identified to be an enabler in keeping families engaged in services. This model adopts a person-centred and holistic approach to ensuring the needs of families are considered from the outset. This means that families have fewer barriers to accessing services and results in them receiving support through a single point of access. To successfully embed this approach, strong partnership and collaborative working across local authorities and the third sector are critical to ensure access to services for families – while also being dependent on staff being knowledgeable on all support on offer. An example drawn from the Dundee Pathfinder illustrates how a parent/carer accessing the drop-in hub (as a result of targeted door knocking by a keyworker) received help with energy bills, was placed on a waiting list for more suitable housing, and received advice regarding employment and further study.

Accessibility of services

Across the initiatives, making services accessible was a key element to positive engagement with families. Accessibility refers to the physical environment being designed so that all individuals can access services, but it also considers a shift in thinking of delivering services in local communities rather than in centralised locations. In one local authority, the employability initiative was delivered in-person at a café, while the Dundee Pathfinder adopted a drop-in hub model located in a community centre. Further, there are examples from Whole Family Wellbeing Funding initiatives and Anchor which highlight the value of co-locating services in schools which allows for ease of access for parents/carers.

These examples demonstrate that being adaptable to local need and identifying locations with high footfall, or central to the local community, enables individuals to engage with services that they may not have done otherwise. This approach relies on good partnership working to allow this type of collaboration and co-location of services. It also requires local knowledge to be able to identify these sites.

Further, the location of services has helped to lessen the experience of stigma for some families accessing services. Through co-location, individuals accessing services felt they were not as easily identifiable as someone attending a building to access a particular support service. Thus, helping to reduce feelings of stigma in accessing support. This was of value in the approach to Anchor which drew on local knowledge, the lack of anonymity in everyday island life, to provide co-located services which normalised services but also reduced the identifiability of individuals using the services.

Flexible and responsive services

Many of the initiatives referenced the flexibility and responsiveness of their services which supported initial and ongoing engagement. Flexibility of approach, in terms of meeting families in locations which are suited to them, listening to their needs and staff tailoring their approach to these needs, rather than having a prescribed pathway, was valued by families and staff. For the Anchor project this was a particular strength as services could be designed to grow organically with each family, tailored to their needs and the needs of rural, island life. For one No One Left Behind employability service, this looked like creating a meeting space where parents/carers were able to attend with their children – and therefore did not need to worry about childcare. This supported engagement with the service and helped work around parents’ schedules and needs. There was also evidence of flexibility and responsive services across School Age Childcare Early Adopter Communities where some local areas were providing specialist services for children with Additional Support Needs in order to maximise engagement with services. Fundamental to this was appropriate training and recruitment of staff to help foster inclusive environments.

Initiatives which had incorporated feedback loops found value for engaging with communities and families. The use of feedback loops are an iterative approach to continuous improvement which allows for feedback to be incorporated into ongoing service design and provision. For example, in the Dundee Pathfinder, it became clear that health concerns were significant barriers to families fully engaging, and benefitting from, available services. Key workers, with their ability to work across policy areas, proactively engaged with Public Health Scotland to develop new routes to engage with the community. Public Health nurses now regularly attend weekly drop-ins and are able to provide private consultations where appropriate, alongside signposting to more bespoke health services. This approach highlights the value in leadership across all levels – with key workers demonstrating flexible, response and person-centred working. However, developing this level of flexibility within services has required explicit buy in from management to support different ways of working.

For outreach and initial engagement, flexible approaches, which consider the local context, have been key. For the Dundee Pathfinder in-person door knocking across the local area helped to raise awareness of the services on offer, while for the Glasgow Pathfinder awareness raising took place in the form of ‘tick boxes’ on early years childcare registration forms which initiated a telephone call from the Glasgow Helps service – and a holistic needs assessment.

Finally, gathering formal and informal feedback was also seen to be an enabler to engagement. Formal feedback refers to evaluation activity and opportunities for families to feedback to services (e.g. feedback forms). Informal feedback refers to informal conversations between staff and families. Children’s Services Planning Partnerships (CSPPs) receiving Whole Family Wellbeing Funding took advantage of existing channels of communication with families to use feedback forms and experience surveys. The Year One Whole Family Wellbeing Funding evaluation report detailed how CSPPs also organised in-person engagement events and workshops with families in order to better understand how to deliver services that met their needs. Additionally, there are examples of CSPPs drawing on discussions between families and key workers during support services to feedback and inform future support. This highlights the iterative and flexible development of services to support the needs of families and ensure continued engagement with services.

Taking time to build trust

Building trust was a fundamental enabler to engagement. This includes trust across the system – from trusting relationships between senior management and staff on the ground, to the trust developed between families and staff. Evidence across the report to date highlights that relationship building takes time and consistent and considered approaches. From the keyworker approach enabling strong and trusting staff and family relationships to collaborative working being embedded across partnership organisations. There are also novel ways of how local areas have sought to further embed this trust and illustrate the value of all involved in delivering and using services.

Through their Child Poverty Accelerator Fund project Midlothian Council developed a programme for parents/carers to be involved in peer research. Through support from local councillors and senior management the project staff were able to use council buildings and spaces to facilitate sessions and the buy in afforded parents/carers taking part as peer researchers to feel valued and engaged.

The Family Wellbeing Partnership provides another example of ensuring trusting relationships across the whole system. Clackmannanshire Council have facilitated Value Based Leadership sessions which have been attended by young people, communities, front line staff, local leaders, and elected council members. The sessions, supported by Columba 1400, have encouraged space for listening, reflection and training, including on trauma-informed practice. This approach has led to new ways of working through moving to a leadership model where trust and permission are provided across the whole community. This embeds the innovative practice of enabling individuals/partners to do things differently, see what happens, learn, reflect and adapt.

Below, the case study spotlight from the Whole Family Wellbeing Funding Year Two report highlights the value of trusting relationships between staff and families, alongside the role of trusting social networks between families, when in engaging families in support services.

Case study spotlight: Drawing trust with, and within, families across Whole Family Wellbeing Funding

What does the programme seek to achieve?

The Whole Family Wellbeing Funding programme aims to transform the way in which family support is delivered, so that families can access the help they need, where and when they need it.

A logic model was developed for the Programme which outlines how the funding is intended to impact children, young people, families and Children’s Services Planning Partnership (CSPP) staff. The outcomes in this logic model provide a basis for exploring, in the Year Two Whole Family Wellbeing Funding evaluation report and future evaluation, the extent to which the outcomes have been achieved. This case study focuses on the outcomes of:

• Children, young people and families say they feel positive and trusting of services
• Children, young people and families are aware of how to access relevant family support services

What has been learned?

Families who had accessed support were positive with many detailing the trusting relationships they had developed with support workers. Indeed, an enabler of the outcome of increasing the number of families receiving whole family support through referrals or self-referrals was the role of a trusted support worker. Across the evaluation data, young people, parents and carers noted that trust played a significant role in encouraging other family members to engage with support services. Further, the trusted support worker role was viewed to be a key factor in ensuring engagement with a more diverse range of families, including those who otherwise may have been reluctant to access support. A key enabler of increasing awareness of how to access relevant family support was word-of-mouth form a trusted source. Many families accessed support services following a recommendation from their social network. It was found that hearing from a trusted source that the service was beneficial and valuable increased the awareness of the support service and encouraged other families to seek out support.

Relevance for engagement with families living in low-income households

Trust is fundamental to service delivery. It has to be earned by staff working across new initiatives, but there is value in building trust to sustain involvement with families and communities. However, there is also value in drawing upon the strength of bonds, through trusted recommendations across social networks, in local communities. Informal word of mouth can be important for engaging and communicating with families.

The role and value of word of mouth for engaging families was also found by those working across the Dundee Pathfinder. The Pathfinders early implementation evaluation report details how the holistic services offered by the local drop-in hub, in the Linlathen area of Dundee, was resulting in people travelling from across Dundee to try and access support at the hub. Word of mouth, and the spreading of trusted recommendations through family and friends, was seen to reduce the ‘fear of the unknown’ described by individuals.

Participation in the design and delivery of services

School Age Childcare is an umbrella term for a range of initiatives and interventions. Work to engage stakeholders and better understand the needs of those using and delivering school age childcare commenced in 2018. Since then, the Scottish Government has provided funding for a range of interventions, including the Access to Childcare Fund and the Early Adopter Communities. Further, the Scottish Government has worked with children and young people, parents/carers and those delivering school age childcare services to co-design services and to develop The National Children’s Charter for School Age Childcare in Scotland. Fundamental to the approach of designing and building a system of school age childcare is that ‘the people of Scotland are supported and empowered to actively participate in the definition, design and delivery of their public services’ (School Age Childcare Delivery Framework).

Co-design has been, and is, fundamental to the principles of school age childcare which lie in designing a system which is people-centred and place-based. This level of engagement means that services can be designed and implemented which meet the needs of those using them, while it can also be valuable in ensuring buy-in from local communities as they are invested in the design and delivery of the initiative.

However, it is important to consider the complexity of participatory work and ensure that engagement will result in meaningful impact. It requires careful planning and commitment. This may not be a feasible option for all initiatives.

For example, across Year One and Year Two Whole Family Wellbeing Funding evaluation reports, there were reflections on the importance of co-design for engaging families in services. It was acknowledged that there was limited evidence of family engagement and co-design being used to inform broader service design (beyond individual services), with this likely being due to barriers in staff capacity to engage in training and guidance on co-design – with further limited capacity to apply these skills and knowledge in practice.

The case study below illustrates the process of involving communities in co-designing a system of school age childcare.

Case study spotlight: Developing a system of School Age Childcare through a People Panel

What does the initiative seek to achieve?

The School Age Childcare programme worked with a system change and strategic design consultancy to establish a People Panel. This Panel consisted of parents/carers and childcare providers. In this context, the People Panel refers to a wide array of interactions and engagements that the external partner undertook over time, rather than a more formal panel configuration. Across Phase One, in 2022, the work engaged over 100 parents/carers and 30 childcare/activity providers and explored experiences of school age childcare – with discussions moving towards developing solutions. This approach enabled people to share their stories and resulted in the gathering of rich, detailed data which identified key barriers and challenges to school age childcare while also allowing for the emergence of design principles for a system of school age childcare. Across Phase Two, in 2023, engagement was focused in one community to explore with a range of key stakeholders what it might take to engage local people in creating a system of school age childcare that worked for their specific circumstances. This particular phase was therefore focused on moving from discussing problems to collaborating on solutions.

What has been learned?

The learnings from the People Panel have provided in-depth, rich and detailed insights into the complex and varied needs of families when developing a funded school age childcare offer. Ultimately, the People Panel has highlighted the value in creating the conditions in local areas to support the effective co-design of school age childcare services, while also allowing for these experiences to be fed into the design of polices at a national level which support the school age childcare system.

Relevance for engagement with families living in low-income households

This case study illustrates the depth of understanding that can come from co-design work. It also highlights how local communities can be involved in the successful co-design of local services, but also influence national policymaking. This centres people and place in the design of a system that works for them. However, it is important to note the involvement of an external partner – with this level of co-design demanding skills, expertise and resource in order to be conducted in a meaningful and ethical way.

There were other examples of participation in design and delivery across other initiatives.

The Midlothian Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund project entailed developing a peer researcher programme. In total, 13 community researchers, with lived experience of poverty, were trained in ethnographic peer research methods. These 13 community researchers would then engage with, and interview, up to 10 further families living in poverty. This will culminate in 100 families being engaged in the lifetime of this project. This approach has provided those engaged with the training with new skills and increased confidence. However, as highlighted in the Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund report on Round 1 reflections and lessons, it also provides insights and knowledge into how to overcome barriers to engaging families.

Further, the Anchor Project, in Shetland, adopted a co-constructed and co-produced approach to their evaluation, utilising creative methods to engage families, workers and community stakeholders. The case study below highlights how this innovative approach supported participants to share their story in more accessible way.

Case study spotlight: Using participatory methods to capture the experiences of stakeholders

What did the initiative seek to achieve?

The independent evaluation of Anchor was led by a team from Robert Gordon University and Shetland Council. The research team drew upon participatory action research methods, across three phases, to undertake a co-constructed and co-produced evaluation. The phased approach to evaluation allowed for the journey of Anchor to be illustrated through agreeing a shared understanding of what needs to be done (Phase One), what needs to change (Phase Two) and what the future could look like (Phase Three). In order to gather data, the research team engaged parents/carers, project workers and key stakeholders working across health and social care, education, police and the third sector. The methods used included workshops, interviews and Photovoice. Photovoice was used as participatory method which can be an open and less intimidating form of eliciting participant perspective. In this method, images generated by the participants, parents/carers and Anchor project workers, were part of the data collection. The use of images and voice notes allowed participants to document and reflect on their unique experiences of Anchor support and provision.

What has been learned?

The phased approach, underpinned by participatory action research methods, allowed for engagement with a diverse range of stakeholders involved in Anchor resulting in the experiences of all key stakeholders to be included in the evaluation. Further, the phased approach to evaluation activity enabled previous phases of work to shape and influence the direction of the next phase. This approach to evaluation aligns with a person-centred approach – a key Scottish Government policy approach and a fundamental value of the Anchor project. This illustrates how policy principles and values can be embedded across all aspects of an initiative (design, delivery and evaluation).

Relevance for engaging with families living in low-income households

A participatory approach to evaluation provides families with accessible and less intimidating ways of engaging in evaluation activity. Further, utilising less traditional methods, such as Photovoice can allow for the diverse range of experiences to be captured, while also allowing for reflection on the lived experiences of families. However, as with the previous case study on the School Age Childcare People Panel, it is important to consider the skills, expertise and resource required to use participatory action research methods with families to ensure positive experiences and positive change.