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

5. To what extent have underreached families been engaged in system change, place-based initiatives?

Key Messages

This chapter sought to understand the extent to which underreached families (such as the priority family types and other marginalised families at risk of poverty) have been engaged with system change, place-based initiatives.

• Priority family groups are engaged with 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.

This chapter of the report considers the extent to which underreached families have been engaged across the system change, place-based initiatives. In particular, we sought to understand the extent to which priority family types, but also other individuals/families with other equality characteristics, were engaged in the initiatives.

Engaging priority families

Many of the initiatives seek to engage families from the priority family types. Below, we outline some of the strategies for engaging with these families as well as outlining some of the barriers.

The Early Adopter Communities for School Age Childcare seeks to target families in the priority groups who are at higher risk of experiencing child poverty. However, the Early Adopter Communities process evaluation report acknowledges the challenges in reaching certain groups across some local areas, such as, minority ethnic families. It was noted that further outreach was required in order to engage these families, with possible support from schools. This was a common theme across other initiatives where there were challenges in reach minority ethnic families with language and cultural barriers often cited as key barriers which needed to be overcome.

As part of the Grant application process, Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund projects were asked to consider the prioritisation of one or more of the priority family groups at greatest risk of child poverty. Across Round One and Round Two of the Fund, projects have focused on a range of priority family types across a range of poverty alleviation projects. For example, South Lanarkshire’s Round One project has tested a holistic and person-centred approach with the aim of empowering parent/carers of disabled children to engage with available support services. For Round One, Aberdeen will work with lone parents and parents under 25 to identify and co-design a holistic programme of support that best meets their needs.

Additionally, there were examples of initiatives engaging with parents/carers and families to gather feedback, either through feedback loops or through formal evaluation activity. For example, a Local Employability Partnership, underpinned by the No One Left Behind approach, identified that they had a high number of lone parents accessing the service and this group would benefit from more tailored support. This has resulted in a peer-to-peer support offer between parents facing similar barriers. This helps to build confidence amongst parents and helps parents to feel less alone on their employability journey. This has been found to be a positive way to increase engagement amongst this group. Further, the Whole Family Wellbeing Funding Year Two evaluation report, highlights the work of a CSPP who, based on evidence drawn from a review of, and feedback on, their programmes to date, provided additional support for families with children with additional support needs (for example, disabilities and/or neurodiversity). This led to the creation of a specialist practitioner post specifically to support families caring for children with additional support needs.

Engaging other marginalised families at risk of poverty

Across the initiatives, a common group that was cited as under-engaging with services were families with non-working adults in the household. The previous chapters outline possible reasons for this relating to stigma, previous negative experiences and fear of loss of household income. As highlighted earlier, it is important for initiatives to still engage with this group to ensure a trusting relationship is developed between the family and service so that support is utilised as and when required.

Across Local Employability Partnerships, the implementation evaluation report of No One Left Behind, found that people dealing with addictions, working parents, long-term unemployed, and care leavers were commonly difficult groups to reach or engage. However, one Local Employability Partnership staff member described how they are trying to understand the extent to which employability services should be delivered at scale or in a more specialised way to reach those who need support most. For some stakeholders and staff across No One Left Behind improving accessibility looked like better promotion of services, better referral pathways between employability services and other services, greater English for Speakers of Other Languages provision, employing frontline staff with lived experience and taking the time to build more meaningful relationships with those using the service.

A need for a greater understanding of how to reach the underreached

While a range of activities and approaches have been used to engage families, data on, and details of, which families/community groups have been engaged and which families/community groups have not been engaged has not been captured at the level of data collection for this report.^[2] This may be an area for further exploration in the broader evaluation of system change, place-based initiatives to tackle child poverty.

An example of this comes from No One Left Behind where Scottish Government colleagues are seeking to conduct work on unmet need across this initiative. They seek to: agree a shared understanding of unmet need; map the extent to which local authorities are gathering data and seeking to understand unmet need in their local areas; explore the possibility of data collection at a national level; and, provide learnings and lessons arising from this work to ensure maximum reach of No One Left Behind.