Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund (CPAF): evaluation - interim report

Chapter 4: Conclusion

This chapter synthesises key learnings and impacts from CPAF Round 1, clearly demonstrating how they are revealing effective ways to make meaningful change for families experiencing poverty.

We begin this chapter by summarising the key learnings from all the CPAF Round 1 projects by the project types identified in Chapter 2. We then draw out a summary against the research objectives before reflecting on the overall value of CPAF thus far. We end with final concluding thoughts on next steps and the importance of local and national leadership.

Key Findings by Project Type

Data-Focused Projects

Data-focused projects explored how better data use and integration could improve service delivery and target support more effectively. Key insights include:

• Confidence in Reliable Household Data is a Key Goal for Local Authorities - Having data at a household level that can help show where local need is has far-reaching implications for proactive service delivery. It better enables targeting of support to the areas and people who need it most, and enables greater confidence in decision-making.

When effective targeting systems are in place, some elements of support can be delivered automatically such as Free School Meals entitlements and Discretionary Housing Payments for families impacted by the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy (Bedroom Tax), as the local authority has all the relevant information required. Others require targeted outreach to gain consent and required information

• Effective Use of Data – Aligning existing administrative datasets improves service efficiency and targeting, as demonstrated by Aberdeen City Council’s development and use of the Low Income Family Tracker. Data-driven approaches also reduce duplication and allow for more proactive support as services with shared aims can see the same information, who may be involved in a case, and potentially track progress for individuals. This is demonstrated by Perth and Kinross Council’s collaboration with the Citizens Advice Bureau. This means less time needs to be spent asking families themselves to explain what is happening, and also means that local authority and third sector staff understand who may or may not already have been contacted.
• Early Intervention – Proactive outreach and early intervention help prevent financial instability, reducing demand on other services.
• Streamlining Processes – Simplifying applications and consent increases benefit uptake and reduces administrative burden. Integrated referral processes enable more holistic support and improve efficiency.
• Validation of Third-Party Data – Third-party datasets require rigorous validation before action is taken based upon related insights, particularly for rural and island communities where urban-based methodologies may not apply accurately.
• Addressing Data Gaps – Improved national datasets are needed to better reflect rural and island communities.

Income Maximisation Projects

Income maximisation projects focused on increasing benefit uptake and improving financial stability for families. Key insights include:

• Embedding Income Maximisation – Integrating income maximisation into existing support services builds trust and increases uptake. A staged approach works best, starting with securing statutory entitlements before progressing to employment readiness.
• Community-Based Delivery – Providing support in informal, community-based settings with a trusted point of contact reduces stigma and improves access. Person-centred support helps reduce isolation and encourages engagement.
• Whole-Family Wellbeing – A whole-family approach enhances both financial and emotional wellbeing, strengthens resilience, and promotes longer-term financial stability.
• Partnership Working – Third-sector partnerships improve access and engagement with families, while overcoming governance and funding barriers to working with partners is essential for success.

Capacity-Building Projects

Capacity-building projects aimed to strengthen local service delivery and empower families and staff. Key Insights include:

• Seeing Power in Relationships, not Tools – A crucial insight from these projects is that success is not just about the tool or approach—but about their success in enabling personal confidence, relationships and fostering human-centred practice.
• Holistic Support – Financial support alone may not meet the full range of family needs. A joined-up, partnership-based approach supported by effective referral mechanisms and addressing multiple challenges is more effective.
• Co-Design and Community Engagement – Co-designed services increase local relevance, buy-in and engagement, but partnership working with communities needs to happen at the pace of the community to build trust and ensure long-term impact.
• Expanding Referral Pathways – Although it can be challenging, providing more frontline workers (not just Financial Inclusion specialists) with training and support on how to make effective referrals to support services can significantly increase the help available to families. Using shared data systems that allow professionals to track what support has been offered and delivered can also strengthen relationships and reduce the pressure on families to keep professionals updated.
• Peer Research – Peer researchers with lived experience can build trust and improve data quality. Providing training strengthens local capacity and supports personal development. Clear processes and ethical frameworks are essential for managing peer researcher roles effectively.
• Language and Framing – Engaging families living in poverty is more effective when framed around the cost-of-living crisis and ‘getting by,’ as the term ‘poverty’ can feel stigmatising and alienating.

Summary Against Research Objectives

Objective 1: How Effectively have CPAF Projects been Implemented?

Overall, CPAF projects demonstrated strong implementation, with effectiveness shaped significantly by local context and partnerships. Key facilitating factors included strong leadership, existing collaborative partnerships, targeted training, and clear pathways for data sharing and integration.

Conversely, barriers included short-term funding cycles leading to rushed implementation and procurement difficulties, technical and legal complexities around data-sharing, and systemic gaps in public services such as education and healthcare.

CPAF’s core principles—innovation, partnership, evidence-based learning, person-centred approaches, and sustainability—significantly influenced local practices, driving deeper collaboration, co-production, and proactive, tailored interventions.

Projects adopted evidence-informed approaches, regularly using emerging data and lived experience insights to refine their practices and innovate continually, enabling responsive adjustments in service delivery.

Objective 2: To What Extent has CPAF funding enabled local areas to enhance their approach to tackling child poverty?

Overall, CPAF funding notably enhanced local authorities’ approaches to addressing child poverty, shifting service delivery towards more proactive support models.

Key impacts for families included substantial income maximisation, improved financial stability, greater social integration, reduced isolation, and strengthened resilience and confidence in navigating support systems. Families experiencing multiple disadvantages—such as single-parent households, families with disabilities, and minority ethnic families—benefited significantly, demonstrating CPAF’s success in reaching priority groups.

Local authorities are strongly committed to embedding project learnings into future service delivery wherever possible, although the extent of sustainability and scalability varies depending on ongoing financial and staffing constraints.

Importantly, engaging people with lived experience meaningfully shaped service design and delivery, but in some cases would benefit in future from clearer structures for adequate compensation, emotional support, and capacity-building to sustain and deepen this involvement.

Objective 3: How are CPAF Projects Contributing to System Change within Local Services?

Overall, most CPAF projects are part of meaningful system-level changes - in some cases they may be a catalyst, and in other cases they have been part of systems-level changes already started. The projects cultivated deeper partnerships between public, third-sector, and sometimes private organisations, enhancing trust, mutual understanding, and coordination in tackling poverty. Grant recipients valued partnerships highly, noting significant benefits in project effectiveness and community responsiveness. However, structural issues such as short-term funding created ongoing barriers, limiting deeper integration and broader systemic change.

CPAF has also promoted significant shifts in organisational culture and values—particularly around increased non-stigmatising support offers, confidence in discussing sensitive poverty-related issues, and willingness to innovate—reflecting deeper behavioural changes that are likely to influence services beyond CPAF’s immediate scope. Collaborative learning between and across CPAF projects further enriched local knowledge, encouraged adaptation, and facilitated the sharing of best practices, enhancing the collective impact of projects nationwide. Activities related to the continuation of CPAF in Round 2, and potentially beyond, can further enhance the impact on system change within local services.

Overall Value of CPAF

The overall value of CPAF lies in its successful operationalisation of key principles: proactive intervention, multi-agency collaboration, holistic family support, innovation, and meaningful co-production with those experiencing poverty. By shifting service delivery from reactive crisis management to proactive and preventive interventions, CPAF is enabling local authorities and partners to identify and support vulnerable families earlier.

Moreover, CPAF's commitment to collaboration and integrated service delivery has helped to facilitate stronger and more effective partnerships across public, private, and third-sector organisations. While the funding provided was only up to £80,000, the success of projects at this small-scale show that there is significant value in further exploring the benefits of supporting further innovations through CPAF and related schemes.

Initiatives like Inverclyde’s integration of welfare advice within community services illustrate the benefits of reducing service silos and leveraging trusted relationships. The principle of holistic family support further ensures that interventions extend beyond immediate financial aid, addressing broader emotional, social, and practical needs, which fosters sustainable improvements in family resilience and community connectedness.

Finally, CPAF’s strong emphasis on co-production and lived-experience engagement has grounded projects in the realities faced by families, enhancing their relevance, responsiveness, and effectiveness. Projects in Midlothian and Moray demonstrate how integrating family voices directly into planning and delivery can create interventions that truly reflect community priorities. While it is too early to make firm conclusions about the sustainability and scalability of all projects, there are clear intentions from all Key Informants to continue looking for service improvements and build upon what they know works. Where it has not been possible to address the core needs families raise, CPAF projects have nonetheless increased their knowledge base of what is and is not working so that more effective conversations can be had going forward.

Strategic Leadership and National Alignment

The Scottish Government’s support for CPAF has created space for local authorities to experiment with new models with greater support and flexibility. This strategic backing has encouraged innovation, cross-project learning, and more flexible approaches to service delivery. Participants highlighted how this approach allowed them to respond to emerging insights and challenges with greater confidence. Stable, longer-term funding cycles coupled with clear national guidance on, and strategic frameworks, for data sharing are essential to maximising the impact of local innovation. Additionally, work at the national level to overcome gaps in key services such as health, social care and education for children with additional support needs is essential to overall goals of reducing child poverty.

Pathways for Sustainability

National government has a critical role to play in improving funding models and regulatory clarity, notably, in regard to negotiating legislation around data sharing and protection - but also in facilitating ongoing learning exchanges, supporting local leaders to share best practices widely. To sustain progress of successful models, coordinated collaboration between local and national government should focus on two key priorities: embedding key principles of effective approaches to tackling child poverty and strengthening collaboration across bodies and organisations that have a role. Many CPAF projects have demonstrated clear lessons in effective practice, particularly when aligned with broader local authority strategies such as digital transformation, children’s services planning, public health, and education — increasing the likelihood of long-term sustainability. Income maximisation projects have shown significant impact when integrated into existing service provision. For example, welfare rights officers attending existing family groups, reinforcing the value of embedding support within established structures.

Strengthening collaboration requires more consistent structural support and improved data-sharing frameworks to enhance cross-sector partnerships. Co-design with families and communities has already strengthened service delivery and improved trust — building on this foundation will further enhance both engagement and impact.

National leadership from the Scottish Government will be critical in supporting learnings and successes from CPAF to be disseminated. Clear guidance, consistent funding, and strategic alignment across councils and health boards will ensure that successful models can be embedded into core service delivery. This is particularly key with regards to improving and streamlining the use of data. Enabling data systems could support local authorities to create meaningful partnerships, ensuring all partners with a role in tackling child poverty are able to access the data they need to provide joined-up, targeted and human-centred services. In this regard, the simplification of consent, application and referral processes using shared systems has demonstrated the potential to significantly improve administrative efficiency, service cohesion, and user experiences within and between local authorities. While the picture here is complex and nuanced as it stands, providing support wherever possible at the Scotland-level for mechanisms which can enable greater integration (and advocating for the same for those governed at the UK level) could be transformative.

Local leadership will also be essential. Councils that have demonstrated strategic alignment, effective partnerships, ability to reduce silo-working, and data-informed targeting should be supported to share their learning to support broader service reform. Some have already started this journey, while others are now beginning it. Strategic alignment, consistent funding, and a focus on early intervention will be critical to breaking the cycle of child poverty in Scotland.

Final Reflections and Next Steps

This interim report provides valuable early insights into the implementation and impact of the CPAF projects, demonstrating how place-based innovation can drive meaningful change in tackling child poverty. Each project has taken a locally rooted approach, adapting to the specific needs and contexts of their communities while testing new models for service delivery, income maximisation, and capacity building. The emerging findings highlight the importance of proactive, data-driven approaches, integrated service delivery, and strong cross-sector partnerships in improving outcomes for families. The lessons gathered so far are already informing both local authority practice and national policy, reinforcing the Scottish Government's strategic ambition to reduce child poverty through targeted, community-based interventions.

This interim evaluation highlights the promise of CPAF’s localised, collaborative approaches to poverty alleviation. Looking forward, the forthcoming final evaluation in March 2026 will provide deeper analysis of longer-term impacts, systemic changes, and the sustainability of these innovative practices.