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

4. What are the barriers to successful engagement with families living in low-income households?

Key Messages

Across the eight initiatives there are key themes which were identified as barriers to engagement with families living in low-income households. Across the themes, there were also learnings in how to overcome these barriers. These include:

• 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, nonlabelling, non-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.

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

Accessibility

While accessibility has emerged as an enabler to engagement – as seen in the previous chapter – it can also be a barrier. While it is evident initiatives and services are taking steps to consider and maximise accessibility, there are still challenges and barriers to consider to ensure accessibility for all.

The local drop-in hub approach, adopted by the Dundee Pathfinder, has been a significant enabler (as identified in the previous chapter). However, there were concerns for some families using the service that they did not feel comfortable accessing the services in a public, community space. This is because confidentiality could not be assured in such a location. Further, it has been identified that having a service in such a public location may also prevent families from engaging if they feel there is a lack of anonymity. However, learnings may be taken from the Shetland Anchor project who encountered similar concerns in the design of their service. In order to minimise barriers to engagement arising from concerns of lack of anonymity, project workers who had any connections to a family (personal or professional) did not take on that family’s case, while Anchor staff were primarily co-located in schools.

Services reliant upon telephone contact, such as the Glasgow Pathfinder and some services offered through No One Left Behind employability support, found that there could be issues with connectivity and waiting times (telephone calls not being answered or being left on hold or people not getting back to them). However, in the case of the Glasgow Pathfinder, the steps taken to remedy the situation by staff from Glasgow Helps, apologising and restoring confidence in the service, enabled the parent/carer to re-engage and receive help from the service.

All initiatives had identified groups that were harder to reach and were underreached. These groups varied across initiatives. For the Dundee Pathfinder, the drop-in hub was a barrier for disabled people who found getting about the community challenging, while for some parents/carers the opening times of the hub meant it was not possible to access the drop-in hub due to other priorities such as childcare, employment and other appointments. The School Age Childcare Early Adopter Communities have identified that minority ethnic families are a particular group that require further outreach across some local areas. However, local areas had begun to taken steps to investigate how best to provide outreach and engage these families.

Stigma towards poverty and accessing support

A Scottish Government report on public attitudes to poverty highlights there is some stigma surrounding living in poverty, with a recent Citizens’ Panel on the impacts of poverty related stigma on benefit take up reporting the complex and deeply engrained nature of this stigma. Across the initiatives it is evident that this awareness of stigma, and attempts to minimise this, have been part of the design process. This includes previous negative experiences of service use, thinking about how services are delivered, and the language used.

Previous negative experiences of service use

A Scottish Government evidence review exploring the risk of marginalisation from the social security system found that previous negative experiences, which can sometimes be traumatising, can be a key barrier to social security engagement. This finding was also evidenced across the initiatives in this project, with the Pathfinders, Whole Family Wellbeing Funding and Anchor evaluations detailing negative public perception of statutory agencies such as His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Scottish Social Security, but also Local Authorities and social work departments. Negative perceptions ranged from: experiences of benefit assessments, appeals and reviews; child protection powers; and access to care and support allocations. This created a feeling of a power imbalance between these agencies and families.

However, across Anchor and the Pathfinders, it was noted that efforts had been made to reduce the obvious links between these statutory services and the voluntary service that was on offer. The partnership working and trust that had been built between families and partnership services meant that statutory services could be in the background and the key worker approach supported engagement with these services when required. Further, for a CSPP, receiving Whole Family Wellbeing Funding, according to practitioners interviewed, families were willing to engage in support due to frontline workers being viewed by families as distinct from social workers. This improved engagement and reduced the negative association with social work that practitioners described as potentially discouraging some families from becoming involved in support.

Rethinking how services are delivered

Across the Pathfinders and the Anchor project, it is clear that the ‘no wrong’ door approach helped to reduce stigma in accessing support and services. Across Anchor, the open-door policy, whereby no one was turned away, allowed for the development of strong and trusting relationships between families and service workers. This helped to embed, and has been crucial to the success of, Anchor in Shetland.

Further, service providers across initiatives considered the wider needs of families in the design and implementation of their services. For an employability service, underpinned by the No One Left Behind approach, this entailed setting up a café which had services and advice available for those attending. This method was seen to be an informal way of engaging families while reducing stigma and ensuring those who need support can access it. Further, a CSPP receiving Whole Family Wellbeing Funding delivered a mobile barbershop which also included a counselling service which helped to breakdown traditional barriers in accessing support.

These approaches are underpinned by person-centred principles which can be crucial in building trust and reaching people who have had little or negative previous contact with services.

Language

Language can play an important role in reducing stigma and making services welcome. Language use is complex and needs careful consideration and thought to ensure it is used in a way to support engagement rather than create further barriers. This was evident across Anchor, Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund, No One Left Behind, and School Age Childcare. In reports, and across discussion with Scottish Government colleagues working across these initiatives, it was identified that reducing the use of labelling and stigmatising terms can help to increase engagement. For example, services providing employability support may be more successful in engagement activity if they do not label themselves as such. It was noted that services focused on job seeking or employment can instil a fear of loss of welfare support (see section on Fear of loss of household income for further discussion), while complex terms such as benefit entitlement support may make families feel services are inaccessible. Therefore, it is crucial to consider accessible language in service design, with terms such as ‘money advice’ being viewed as appropriate and key to engagement.

Examples of this can also be found across the Year Two evaluation report of the Whole Family Wellbeing Funding programme, which highlights how practitioners have to consider how they frame the relevant support to families. For example, when engaging with children and young people it can be beneficial to reframe the initial support offer to an informal activity, such as going for a walk, rather than a formal or structured activity like they would do in school.

Further, when engaging with those with lived experience of living in poverty, it is important to be mindful that people may not define themselves as living in poverty. A recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on poverty stigma, identified how ‘poverty is not an identity nor is it a condition that people living in or with it easily embrace or reclaim’. The reflections on Round 1 of the Child Poverty Accelerator Fund noted how the term poverty should be avoided to move away from stigma associated with this term, and to lead to greater engagement. This is particularly pertinent when engaging with local communities through activities and service provision. The report suggests that engagement could focus on broader structural issues, such as engaging families through money advice or food banks.

Recruiting, retaining, and developing staff

While staffing has been acknowledged as a significant enabler to engaging families living in low-income households, the nature of staffing can also be a barrier. Recruitment of staff across Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund projects was a challenge when projects are short-term which required fixed-term contracts which are often unappealing. However, some projects resolved this challenge by working alongside their delivery partners to fill the post by an existing member of their staff with the necessary knowledge and skills. CSPPs delivering Whole Family Wellbeing Funding activities encountered similar challenges in recruiting staff for fixed term contracts. However, CSPPs had overcome this by filling Whole Family Wellbeing Funding related posts with existing staff, while the Fife’s CSPP recruited staff on a permanent basis. This came with the risk of finding new posts for these employees if activities stop beyond the end of funding periods. However, senior management have the intention to make Whole Family Wellbeing Funding ‘business as usual’ if there is evidence of positive outcomes.

Part of the innovative approach many initiatives are taking involve working in different ways, promoting partnership working and taking a person-centred approach, which demands training and retraining of staff to ensure they are working in this way. This was noted in Clackmannanshire’s approach across the Family Wellbeing Partnership and their commitment to values-based leadership and trauma informed practice. In particular, the trauma-informed training has enabled staff working across the Child Wellbeing Partnership strand to enhance their support offer for children with Additional Support Needs resulting in greater engagement with families.

Data sharing

For many initiatives, data sharing between organisations has been a barrier to engaging families. Both Pathfinders have incurred difficulties in negotiating data sharing agreements with the Department for Work and Pensions and Social Security Scotland. This has meant that available data which would help to identify or target priority family groups has been not yet been obtained. For the Early Adopter Communities data sharing agreements were in place across providers and partners. However, this itself caused challenges as not all partners were willing to sign agreements due to a fear of legal repercussions if an error in sharing data was to be made. Meanwhile, CSPPs across the Whole Family Wellbeing Funding Programme found challenges in a lack of streamlined and misaligned processes and information management systems. This was identified as the main factor limiting CSPPs from achieving the outcome of using analysed evidence from children, young people and families to help inform multi-agency and partnership planning and service delivery.

The evidence suggests that this is an on-going challenge with regards to engaging families and requires further consideration and work to ensure data is being shared to maximise the reach of initiatives.

Fear of loss of household income

For some families living in poverty, fear of cuts to social security benefits can be a barrier to accessing support. This may be a pertinent concern for families living in poverty who, following the COVID-19 pandemic and Cost of Living Crisis, may have experienced a compounding of their existing disadvantage as a result of rising costs, and limited, if any, ability to manage these crises. For example, a recent Scottish Government report on the Cost of Living Crisis highlights that interventions intended to lessen the impact of rising costs, associated with high inflation, have not addressed the legacy of austerity which resulted in many households entering the Crisis in financial hardship.

In one initiative, there were examples where families engaged with a service, but upon taking a ‘better off’ assessment, disengaged from the service. This was because the assessment showed, at the present time, they would not increase their household income by being in employment. Further, as discussed in greater detail in the earlier section of stigma, those working across a number of initiatives have noted the importance of not referring to ‘employability’ with this term being associated with a concern from parents/carers around loss of benefits. This fear can be a significant barrier to engaging families most in need of the support and it highlights how services need to support unique and diverse family circumstances. For some families, they are not yet at a position to enter into employment, and the aim should be ensuring they are accessing all the support and benefits they are entitled to as well as signposting them to appropriate services. This helps to build trust between families and services with the families then feeling more able to return to services as and when their situation changes. This ensures timely, responsive support, but also meets the individual needs and circumstances of families.