Child Poverty Practice Accelerator Fund evaluation: final report

Annex C: The Four Capacities for Reducing Child Poverty

This annex examines what the evaluation reveals about the systems that enable or constrain local action to reduce child poverty. It serves as the full analytical background to Section 5. Please note that the figures referred to throughout this section are held in the supporting documents section.

Much policy and evaluation practice is grounded in a linear, cause-and-effect model, in which interventions are assumed to produce outcomes through relatively direct and predictable pathways. While this approach can be useful for assessing delivery and short-term impact, it is less effective in explaining why improvements are sustained in some contexts but not in others. This annex explores the recurring system patterns through four interconnected system capacities. These are represented by Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) - visual models that explore how different factors interact over time to reinforce or inhibit positive change.

Overview of the Four Capacities

Figure 1 provides a holistic overview of the four sub-systems we have analysed that contribute to the four capacities and how they relate to one another as a coherent structure. The colour scheme used here is carried through all causal loop diagrams that follow, indicating which capacity particular models and variables relate to. Refer to the supporting documents section to view this figure.

Figure 1 can be read hierarchically from top to bottom:

• Strategic level: Shared intelligence and rules that enable action create the conditions for everything else to work. Without this framework, the other capacities are limited in supporting action on insight, measuring progress and impact, and collaborating around service improvement in ways that sustain what is proven to help families.

• Organisational level: Joined-up leadership and coordination — where Child Poverty Coordinators play a material role — enable councils, health boards, advice services, community partners and other strategic working groups to act as one. They foster shared purpose, open communication and joint learning, without which separate programmes cannot integrate into a coherent offer.
• Practice level: Trusted, continuous support in communities where systems interface with families’ lived experience and needs. Long-term, trusted relationships lay the foundations for early prevention, self-sustaining word-of-mouth networks, and deeper insight into context and intersectionality — helping both frontline workers and families navigate systems with confidence and dignity. Ongoing dialogue with families and frontline workers keeps organisational practice rooted in shifting ways of working to better reflect what communities need. It ensures learning flows continuously between families, frontline workers and decision-makers. This enables services to remain adaptive, inclusive, ethical and cost-efficient.

The CPAF projects named beside each capacity in Figure 1 indicate where learning was most relevant or concentrated. While most projects embodied more — or in West Lothian’s case, all — elements of the capacities, they have been positioned according to where improvement was a core focus, or where strengthening that capacity would have the greatest impact on overall viability. Taken together, they show how practical experience across the CPAF portfolio maps onto the architecture of a single, interdependent system, and identifies the stakeholders best placed to validate the models and co-produce future improvements. The viability of these capacities can be examined and enhanced individually. However, when these layers reinforce one another, they create a system that is more resilient, cost-efficient and capable of sustaining progress over time.. This whole-system view underpins the causal loop diagrams that follow, which explore each capacity in detail.

Reading the Causal Loop Diagrams

To make sense of the systems underpinning CPAF projects, this evaluation uses Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs). These are visual maps that describe how different features in a system influence one another over time. Each diagram focuses on one capacity, while recognising that all four are embedded and interdependent within the same overall structure shown above.

In a CLD, arrows show cause-and-effect relationships, while plus (+) and minus (–) signs indicate whether a change in one variable increases or decreases another. Reinforcing loops (R) represent feedback cycles where effects compound over time — either virtuous or vicious.

For example, in the loop shown in Figure 2 (see supporting documents), greater local trust can lead to more successful engagement and referrals, which in turn builds still greater trust — a virtuous cycle. However, the same loop can operate in reverse: loss of trust can reduce engagement, which further erodes trust — a vicious cycle. In other words, a reinforcing loop amplifies the direction of change, whether positive or negative. A shift in the direction of even one variable can invert the feedback as its effects transmit through the loop, turning a virtuous cycle into a vicious one, or vice versa. This dual aspect of CLDs is essential to understanding them and to planning or testing interventions based on their logic.

The diagrams depicted within the supporting documents are not intended to portray perfect systems, but to represent the real interactions observed across CPAF projects — the patterns that have, or have been perceived to have, strengthened or weakened local efforts. They help explain why some projects achieve sustained momentum while others struggle to move beyond short-term outputs.

The CLDs can therefore be read as both a hypothesis grounded in experience and a diagnostic tool. They can highlight and inform where root intervention could most effectively strengthen the feedback loops that improve system performance. They can also explain unintended negative consequences of well-meaning improvements.

Relational, organisational and strategic variables are linked within the CLDs because project stakeholders (through interviews and focus groups) have consistently observed or perceived causal connections between them. When sequences of these relationships reinforce one another positively, systems tend to become more cohesive, cost-efficient, adaptive and humane. When they reinforce negatively, the opposite occurs — fragmentation, inefficiency and loss of trust. The names and variables within these have all emerged from the evaluation data collected across Round 1 and Round 2 projects.

The sections that follow will explore these dynamics in detail for each capacity in turn, showing how forces arise and what conditions make the difference between a fragile and viable system for reducing child poverty. These are presented in a sequence based not on the whole system hierarchy, but on the logic of general understanding — moving from what may be most, to the least, familiar and concrete territory. Each step provides context and rationale for interpreting the next capacity, and, from there, the system as a whole.

The first section details the joined-up leadership and coordination capacity — the level most familiar to practitioners and policymakers. Fully embedded within this is the ongoing dialogue with families and frontline workers capacity — which roots service design in authentic lived experiences, needs and contexts. The next section, examines the trusted, continuous support in communities capacity, describing the dynamics that influence effective engagement, referral and evaluation on the ground. Finally, it turns to the shared intelligence and rules that lead to action capacity — the most abstract and structural of the capacities, yet the one with the greatest potential to enable the others and deliver the largest efficiencies.

Joined-up leadership and coordination & Ongoing dialogue with families and frontline practice

The joined-up leadership and coordination capacity captures the common dynamics that arise from the presence, or absence, of structures which enable stakeholders to organise around effective practice on child poverty, at a local and national level. It illustrates conditions that allow services to share purpose and resources, pool insight and expertise, rationalise activity, adapt quickly, and build a culture grounded in common values and goals. While ongoing dialogue with families and frontline practice can be treated as a distinct capacity, CPAF evidence shows it functions most powerfully when embedded within leadership and coordination structures, rather than operating as a standalone system.

In short, this can be viewed as organisational design thinking geared towards translating strategic intent into coordinated local and national action. At the core is a basic idea: when people across services understand one another’s roles, respect each other’s expertise, and work collaboratively with families, coordination becomes easier and more effective. Over time, this builds a self-reinforcing culture of “we solve this together” rather than “that’s someone else’s job”.

What the system contains

Within the CLD shown in Figure 3 (see supporting documents), the essential joined up leadership and coordination capacity is depicted in blue, illustrating structures and relationships that enable services and partners to coordinate effectively. These show that collaboration depends on continuous exchange between learning, practice, and strategy. Potential intervention points indicate where targeted change — in coordination, data feedback, or co-design — has, or could have, shifted a vicious to a virtuous cycles. The essential ongoing dialogue with families and frontline practice is depicted in green, illustrating how this capacity is a vital efficiency and moral link.

At its centre, contained within the blue oval, a core reinforcing loop illustrates how collaboration between partners can become self-reinforcing. Shared purpose supports coordination; coordination sustains dialogue and learning; dialogue improves evidence and relevance; and evidence demonstrates success, reinforcing shared purpose once again. When this loop operates positively, collective working becomes the norm and efficiency improves. Efficiency gains emerge as services share resources, reduce duplicated outreach, and coordinate engagement around the same families and localities. When continuity is disrupted — for instance through staff turnover, short-term funding or data gaps — the same feedback reverses: duplication increases, motivation drops, and energy dissipates, as the communication rhythm that keeps partners aligned is broken.

Significantly, many of the CPAF projects originated within these horizontal structures that cut across services — relationships and ideas made possible by the policy framework and the funding for a dedicated coordinator. This role provides a clear example of the potency of an intervention point to spread effects through systems in ways that far outweigh the initial investment. In this case, these coordinators, have enabled, anchored, and accelerated collaborative dynamics that would otherwise have been difficult or impossible.

Conversely, given its systemic importance, taking this role for granted can also become a point of fragility to be mindful of. If a coordinator leaves, and tacit knowledge and relational glue disappears with them, continuity and collective memory is broken. By contrast, where succession is considered, knowledge is routinely captured, and there is more collective responsibility for holding the whole picture, the system is more resilient.

Relationships with the other capacities

The CLD also features relationships with variables from the two remaining capacities.:

• Trusted Continuous Support in Communities (yellow) — the ground layer — ensuring that coordination remains connected to consistent, trusted, person-centred engagement on the ground. This represents the arena for collaborative strategy and action, and the learning to necessarily inform this. It enables continuous place, practitioner and family insights, while promoting outreach and service experimentation and efficiencies, and regulating organisational coordination.

• Shared Intelligence and Rules that Enable Action (pink) components are a key determinant of the overall effectiveness, efficiency and evaluation of coordinated activities. These constitute the data structures and policy frameworks that enable, or disable, holistic intelligence, joined-up collaboration, and general adaptability. Essentially, when this layer functions well, partners can act confidently on evidence rather than assumption.

Viewed from the perspective of these capacities, the organisational layer provides the operational bridge between strategy, dialogue and practice. Coordination is reinforced by its surrounding layers.

Key levers (what actually moves the system)

1. Dedicated coordination with convening power A clearly identified role that joins dots across services and holds the shared purpose in view (e.g., Aberdeen City Council’s Coordinator in Round 2).
2. Dialogic co-design as the default design approach Routine, structured dialogue with families and frontline workers so services are co-piloted, not just consulted on (e.g., NHS Grampian and Aberdeenshire Council’s Round 2 participant-led design).
3. Frontline feedback looping Rapid cycles where data tools or services and frontline experience tune each other (e.g., West Lothian Council’s Round 2 dashboard/practice loop).
4. Embedded lived-experience and interdisciplinary panels Standing forums that make co-design part of governance, not an event (e.g., City of Edinburgh Council’s ongoing partnership with panels run by The Poverty Alliance, and Round 2 panel of council staff).
5. Enabling strategic data assets Tools that are accurate enough to target, simple enough to use, and integrated enough to share (e.g., West Lothian Council’s Round 2 dashboard developed by The Improvement Service).
6. Adaptive funding and pragmatic scope Flex to follow learning and maintain continuity, and progressive efficiency (e.g., NHS Tayside and Dads Rock’s Round 2 project adapting to cover the full NHS Tayside region rather than focusing on one area of Dundee).

Barriers and constraints (what holds the system back)

• Departmental gatekeeping and capacity limits: when teams are over-stretched, risk-averse, or unsure of remit, collaboration slows. These constraints are internal to the whole system (within and between organisations) and require active management to prevent them from eroding momentum and coherence.
• Misaligned geographies and systems: e.g., differing NHS footprints or data access constraints can add friction. For example, East Renfrewshire Council’s Round 2 project not being able to include big local employers outwith the council area).
• Rigid funding rules: short cycles and arrears conditions can undercut continuity (For example, one Key informant described the culture of funding as “short term funding for long term problems”).

What this delivers when it works

• A positive partnership culture: one which promotes workforce and service user satisfaction, motivation and wellbeing around shared goals and successes.
• Targeted, integrated, and adaptive delivery: right partners present, right place/time, iterating from real use.
• Higher legitimacy and trust: families see their input reflected in decisions; practitioners see their feedback used; partners see effort turning into joint results.
• Efficiency gains: less duplication, faster problem resolution, and more credible case-making for continuation or scale
• Learning and innovation diffuses quickly across teams and areas, extending system resilience and accelerating improvement.

Trusted, continuous support in communities

The trusted, continuous support in communities capacity, shown in Figure 4 within the supporting documents section, captures the dynamics that determine whether services can build and sustain trusted, person-centred engagement and relationships with families over time. It represents the ground layer of the wider CPAF system — where frontline presence, community trust, and informal networks form the social infrastructure that enables all other systems to function. When this system works well, families and their communities experience continuity of contact, practitioners gain a deep understanding of local realities, and insights flow naturally between people and services. Over time, stable relationships generate confidence, timely referrals, and mutual awareness that ripples through communities as trust and word-of-mouth.

At its heart is a simple but powerful principle: poverty reduction relies on relationships that last long enough for trust to compound. Advisors, family-support workers, and outreach teams need time, stability, and joined-up infrastructure to stay visible and responsive within the communities they serve. Once established, self-sustaining relationships require fewer resources to maintain than starting or restarting engagement from scratch.

What the system contains

Within the CLD shown in Figure 4, the Trusted, Continuous Presence in Communities Capacity is represented by the yellow variables, with key intervention points, circled in red. It captures the conditions that determine whether local services can maintain a trusted, frontline, person-centred presence over time. The CLD shows how sustained visibility and engagement generate local trust and knowledge, strengthen informal networks, and improves resource efficiency — the foundational dynamics on which effective referral, collaboration, and prevention depend.

At the centre of the yellow layer lie two reinforcing loops, depicting how fragile early outreach can evolve into a self-sustaining system of local trust and engagement. These loops are best read through the three variables running horizontally across the CLD — Continuity of Presence, Stability and Reach of Informal Networks, and General Local Trust and Awareness. The dashed arrows between them indicate that these relationships take time and investment to mature.

Typically, an outreach project begins by establishing a foothold in a community — feeling its way as to where, how, and with whom engagement works best. At this stage, progress depends heavily on local individuals such as volunteers, community organisers, and key figures like the janitor at the village hall or the food bank lead. The variable Continuity Risks of Dependency on Key Local Intermediaries reflects this fragility: when too much depends on a few individuals, the departure of one can set the project back. Over time, as the number and diversity of intermediaries increase, the network becomes more stable and resilient. With this stability, General Local Trust and Awareness expand, amplifying Successful Person-Centred Engagement and Referrals. This latter virtuous loop becomes an engine of self-sustaining presence — where the community begins to explain and signpost services via positive word-of-mouth.

A second reinforcing dynamic operates between Successful Person-Centred Engagement and Experience of and Sensitivity to Local Intersectional and Whole-Family Support Needs. Here, alignment between frontline presence, service design, and the support needs of the whole person or family further strengthens community trust and responsiveness. A complementary variable — a Single Point-of-Contact (as exemplified by the Citizens Advice Bureaux model) — has consistently shown to be both a key intervention and user ask, helping families navigate complex service systems, simplify processes, and advocate when needed.

The fundamental intervention point and driver for this capacity is Continuity of Presence. Without it, none of the reinforcing loops can operate. When continuity is maintained, local intelligence accumulates, coordination strengthens, and engagement costs fall. When it breaks, the loops reverse.

The model also illustrates an important link between continuity and efficiency. The variable Resource Efficiencies: Keeping the Ball in the Air vs Cost of Discontinuation represents the learning that even modest sustained investment prevents far greater cumulative loss. The question, therefore, is not only how to launch or innovate outreach but how to keep it viable in the long-term. Once the system is stable, outreach can become more flexible — needing less active presence and resource to keep things going, but able to respond if engagement starts to dip.

Relationships with the other capacities

The CLD also represents key ways the other capacities have, or could, beneficially and mutually interact with, and influence, the Continuity of Presence and Whole-Family Support System, as follows:

• Joined up Leadership and Coordination (blue) — at the lower right of the CLD, the blue oval contains a reinforcing loop from the system described in the previous section. It represents how consistent presence on the ground provides the intelligence and feedback that horizontal collaboration needs to drive service integration, improvement and adaptation (where the embedded Co-production and Dialogue Capacity, detailed in the previous section, is a material enabler). In turn, evidence of collective success can build partnership legitimacy and culture, helping to sustain momentum and continuity of presence through shared efficiencies and aligned effort.
• Shared Intelligence and Rules that Lead to Action (red) — shown as a key enabling intervention at the top right of the CLD, this capacity determines how visible and responsive continuity can be. When data systems and policy are aligned with the whole-family values and realities of this layer, referrals flow smoothly and information travels in both directions. Partners and frontline capacity can act on real-time insight, and decision-makers can see and evidence the value of sustained presence.

Additionally, the CLD also contains Local Economic Circulation and Employment (white) — the upper-left reinforcing loop represents a potentially important feedback between family-level outcomes and the wider local economy. CPAF projects noted that when successful engagement and income maximisation increase household income, that spending recirculates through local shops and services, sustaining jobs and essential amenities. In the longer-term, the effect might be regarded as a balancing force on demand for local support, thereby reinforcing the viability of continuity of presence.

Key levers (what actually moves the system)

1. Continuity of outreach roles and trusted relationships The preeminent intervention for this system. Long-term, consistent presence from familiar staff builds confidence and allows deep understanding of family realities (e.g., South Lanarkshire Council’s Round 1 Link Workers; Stirling Council’s Round 2 family worker).
2. Single point of contact A visible, reliable contact person helping families navigate complex systems, simplifying communication, and advocating on their behalf if required, ensuring promises are kept, and reinforcing trust and continuity built by frontline workers. This was a key feature of South Lanarkshire Council’s Round 1 project, and also integral to the approach of the Citizens Advice Bureaux (CAB) approach, and thereby into all CPAF projects where they are the partner responsible for outreach.
3. Cross-service collaboration to share responsibility for presence Regular coordination between councils, third sector, and health partners keeps support visible and reduces dependency on single workers (e.g. NHS Grampian and Aberdeenshire Council’s Round 2 collaboration; NHS Tayside’s Round 2 partnership with Dads Rock; and Inverclyde Council’s Round 1 partnership with Home Start Inverclyde).
4. Feedback between lived experience and data systems Mechanisms which enable frontline intelligence to feed upward into strategic data and horizontal decision making, which in turn guide outreach priorities. In regard to data systems, simple processes which enable information-sharing can prevent duplication and help families access the right support faster (detailed further in the next section).
5. Stable funding and realistic timescales Multi-year or rolling support avoids the stop–start cycles that can damage trust. Short-term pilots risk undoing progress and putting off talented workers from staying on otherwise successful projects.

Together these levers enable continuity to compound rather than reset, sustaining presence and trust over time.

Barriers and constraints (what holds the system back)

• Short-term funding and project cycles (if longer term planning is not built in): cause discontinuous outreach, and repeated loss of staff, relationships, and institutional memory.
• Dependence on individual champions: makes systems fragile when key people move on. This again underscores the importance of a stable presence, and broader systems integration, which distributes knowledge and responsibility, and reduces dependency on individual staff members and community intermediaries.
• Rising case complexity and burnout: the erosion of statutory services, combined with more families with multiple challenges, increase demands on workers and volunteers unless caseloads and support structures adapt.
• Measurement pressures: Short project timescales and fragmented data systems make it hard to capture the true, compounding value of continuity in statistical terms. Quantitative indicators are not well-suited to the slow, trust-based nature of progress, while attribution challenges — for example, when outreach triggers referrals that arrive through other routes — further dilutes clear evidence of real impact. As a result, using short-term measures may lead to undervaluing presence.

What this delivers when it works

When continuity and collaboration reinforce one another, the system becomes more efficient, humane, and self-sustaining, which can include:

• Greater visibility and accessibility: families know where to find help, and see that it is available without stigma.
• Earlier, more preventive support: continuous relationships allow issues to surface before crisis point, reducing demand for acute interventions.
• Richer strategic intelligence: outreach insights feed into data systems, improving local planning and targeting.
• Community and economic resilience: when families access entitlements and employment support, money circulates locally, strengthening both households and neighbourhood economies.

In conclusion, when continuity of presence and horizontal collaboration reinforce one another, trust between services and citizens deepens, turning support into genuine partnership and making the system more humane, efficient, and self-sustaining.

Shared intelligence and rules that enable action

Data underpins every other viable system in child-poverty reduction. It connects what services know about need, what they do in response, how well those responses work, and how teams are able to reliably know responses have worked. The findings from Aberdeen City Council’s, North Ayrshire Council’s and Argyll and Bute Council’s Round 1 projects, alongside West Lothian Council’s and East Lothian Council’s Round 2 project are particularly influential in determining the characteristics of these overlapping systems.

Within CPAF, the shared intelligence capacity operates across three interconnected levels:

1. The Strategic Data System
2. Dashboard /Trackers
3. CRM Data Sharing & Integration

Together these loops form the nervous system of local action. They are explored in turn in the following sections.

1. The Strategic Data System: A Holistic Perspective

Figure 5 (see supporting documents section) proposes a representation of the whole strategic data system as it has emerged through the evaluation. It is not a CLD, but a flow diagram showing how information, consent and action combine to enable the connected processes involved in tackling child poverty on the ground. The difference between a flow diagram and the CLD is that the plus signs do not indicate “like effect,” but the potential for one component to integrate with and strengthen another.

Together, the components can be regarded as an invisible scaffolding that, if working as stakeholders and users wish it could, would become a whole enabling system that promotes coherence, cost-efficiency and humane processes across all the other capacities.

What this looks like from the user perspective

Given that this may be the most unfamiliar and abstract of the four capacities, it may be helpful to first anchor Figure 5 in the white outer ring, beginning at the top, and to take the first-person perspective of a family experiencing the system. The logic and purpose of every data component — the corresponding inner pink ring — can then be understood in relation to these stages, as follows:

• Establishing unmet need, targeting outreach and frontline opportunities. Imagine you are a parent or carer with complex family needs, facing overlapping stresses. You don’t know where or how to find help. In the course of daily life — at the school gate, at the GP practice, or because a trusted neighbour suggested it — you come into contact with someone who can help: a health visitor, a teacher, a youth worker, or a community outreach officer knocking on your door.

Behind the scenes: Dashboards or trackers have allowed partners to identify where unmet need is likely to be highest, and where outreach or presence will make the biggest difference. When these tools are accurate, teams can place the right people in the right place. When they are not, engagement becomes uncertain.

• Evaluating whole-person and whole-family context and needs. The person you meet listens carefully, helps you talk about what is going on, and makes it easier to explain things that feel difficult or overwhelming. They are able to understand your wider family context — finances, childcare, housing, health, relationships, work — and connect these to entitlements or services you were not aware of. They guide you through what is available, what you may be eligible for, and what steps to take before things reach crisis point.

Behind the scenes: Online informational support tools (such as Advisor.net or the Better Off Calculator), help the person (and you) engage in a socially difficult conversation, recognise needs that might otherwise be missed, and help you both understand complex benefits rules. These may not be perfect, but where they work, and have been informed by appropriate training, they help frontline workers and families navigate complexity with greater confidence. Without this, the person has to rely entirely on personal knowledge, memory and confidence, which increases the risk of their avoiding difficult, uncertain or unfamiliar territory.

• Enabling easy access to support. You decide you want help. Ideally, the system makes this simple: one conversation, one referral that captures everything others need to understand your context, challenges and needs — and everyone who can help follows up. You do not have to repeat your story or navigate multiple forms or websites.

Behind the scenes: Shared referral mechanisms (such as FORT) ensure that an agreed action is recorded, visible to partners and followed through. At this stage of the journey, a Universal Consent Layer (such as an “Apply Once” or “My Account” model) could allow you to give permission once, in a clear and lawful way, to be contacted by all who can help. In practice, however, beyond the initial online referral, systems and consent operate in silos; information does not flow; and families are asked to provide the same details repeatedly because single points of contact (e.g., CAB) or different teams cannot see what another team already holds.

• Responding effectively to need (income maximisation and wider support). If all goes well, the joined-up support you need arrives: entitlement checks, debt advice, employability support, childcare help, a warm hand-off to another service, or practical assistance with forms and applications. You experience a system that feels stable, coordinated and human. In addition, if new benefits or entitlements emerge that match your circumstances, you are pleasantly surprised to be contacted proactively rather than having to discover them yourself.

Behind the scenes: This level of responsiveness requires CRM systems that record, monitor and share data and actions in ways that enable partners to effectively coordinate. This visibility and the consent you gave previously could also enable you to be contacted proactively should new entitlements arise or circumstances change, rather than having to re-enter the system. Together, these elements help frontline workers see when referrals have been acted on, ensure that families do not fall between services, and maintain continuity across teams. Ideally, information recorded about outcomes for families would also feed back into the system, contributing to the granularity and accuracy of the dashboard / tracker. This would thereby enable services to identify and engage other families who may be facing similar crises.

What the system contains

Across CPAF projects, effective shared intelligence systems were defined less by the presence of individual tools and more by how well those tools were integrated, governed, and connected to frontline practice. At a minimum, viable systems for shared intelligence contained the following components:

• CRM systems and shared data layers Linked or unified CRM approaches — or shared data layers using common identifiers — enabled information to be accessed across teams and partners. CPAF evidence consistently showed these approaches to be more effective than isolated departmental systems. Where no overarching integration strategy existed, teams became reliant on local workarounds that improved performance in specific services but limited system-wide learning. This is explored further in a later section.
• A unified consent layer Effective systems included a lawful mechanism allowing individuals and families to grant consent once for their information to be used across relevant services. Where consent could travel with the individual, systems were better able to support proactive outreach, reduce application fatigue, and maintain visibility of entitlements. National initiatives such as SAVVI and My Account indicate how this could operate at scale, while some local tools (e.g. FORT) already embed multi-agency consent within referral pathways.
• Dashboards and tracking tools Live dashboards translated administrative data into practical intelligence usable by both analysts and frontline staff. Examples such as West Lothian Council’s Round 2 dashboard and Aberdeen City Council’s Low-Income Family Tracker demonstrate how continuous feedback between analysts and practitioners can turn dashboards from static reporting tools into adaptive systems that reflect lived and practice realities.
• Referral mechanisms integrated with data systems Functional systems ensured that the identification of unmet need led to action rather than just administrative burden. CPAF key informants reported that passive signposting frequently failed to result in uptake, whereas active referral mechanisms — integrated with CRM systems and dashboards — created accountability, improved transparency across partners, and supported higher engagement.
• Online decision-support tools for practitioners Tools such as Advisor.net and the Better Off Calculator enabled practitioners to check eligibility and entitlements during live conversations. Having access to reliable, easy-to-use resources supported more confident, accurate and empathetic practice, reducing the need to defer or avoid sensitive financial discussions.

Relationships to other capacities

• Trusted, Continuous Support in Communities Capacity. Each stage of the family journey shown here entails the stability and responsiveness of frontline practice. Where strategic data components align the capacity becomes easier to sustain. Where components are fragmented, pressures are put on this system which can result in broken continuity, missed needs, and frontline workers that waste time on navigating systems that could be spent on supporting families.
• Joined-up Leadership and Coordination (including embedded Ongoing Dialogue with Families and Frontline Practice). The cohesion of this layer depends on shared information, clear pathways and visible evidence of successful delivery. The Shared Intelligence Capacity largely determines the quality and actionability of these factors. When its components integrate, partners can coordinate around real demand. When they do not, opportunities for joined-up action are lost, and co-produced insights struggle to translate into system-wide change. In regard to the Ongoing Dialogues with Families and Frontline Practice Capacity, it is notable that the Aberdeen City Round 1 LIFT tracker provided targeted recruitment for the young parents for the Round 2 CPAF Project, implying another potential reinforcing loop for this capacity of effective joined-up data solutions.

Taken together, Figure 5 shows that the Shared Intelligence and Rules that Enable Action Capacity does not operate alongside the other capacities but significantly shapes them. Returning to the “helicopter view” in the diagram, the whole picture appears rational and coherent. It is a system in which each component could support the next, enabling families, frontline workers, and partners to coordinate around effective, cost-efficient, and humane pathways to help.

The reality encountered across CPAF projects, however, is different. Rather than a single, enabling system, local partners face a patchwork of discrete or partially connected tools, databases, consent processes and referral routes, some internal, some outsourced or third party.

Key levers (what actually moves the system)

• Unified or interoperable CRMs – or at minimum, a shared data layer using common identifiers.
• A lawful, scalable consent framework enabling “apply once, use many times.”
• Live dashboards and feedback loops that combine analytical precision with frontline reality.
• Accessible online tools that empower staff to act accurately and compassionately.
• National alignment and investment to overcome local fragmentation and licensing barriers.

These are explored more in the two sub-components of this capacity which are explored later in this annex.

What this delivers when it works

When these strategic elements align, councils and partners can move from reactive reporting to proactive prevention. Data becomes a shared public good: legally secure, ethically governed, and trusted by professionals and families alike. Decisions gain precision, duplication drops, and families receive timely, coordinated support. When they are absent, data remains fragmented, under-used, or feared — and the system’s ability to learn and target support stalls.

The kind of whole-system working exemplified by the West Lothian Council Round 2 project offers a potentially invaluable opportunity, where frontline practitioners, a lived experience panel, council analysts, data officers and national expertise have come together around open-source, openly-learnable dashboard. Here, connected coordination at both the local authority and national (via the Improvement Service) level offers great potential for the dissemination and replication of learning from this pilot.

2. Dashboard / Tracker: Enablers & Constraints

The CLD in Figure 6 (see supporting documents section) sets out the dynamics that shape whether data can be turned into timely, trusted insight that supports confident, well-targeted action on child poverty. It shows how a dashboard or tracker should improve through continual use and feedback, and what prevents that from happening in practice. This capacity is the strategic intelligence layer that connects learning from the frontline to decision-making at organisational and system levels, and is essential for improving how partners work together, evaluate progress and align resources

What the system contains

The CLD in Figure 6 is intended to convey the dynamics that determine whether a dashboard (and tracker) can become accurate, responsive and able to guide targeted action on child poverty. Features of the Shared Intelligence and Rules that Enable Action capacity relevant to this are represented by the pink variables. At its centre is a reinforcing loop that describes how a dashboard could progressively improve if supplied with consistent granular data and regularly validated through lived experience and frontline feedback.

On the left-hand side of the CLD, three variables — which also represent the key intervention points — capture the structural conditions that currently frustrate, but could eventually enable, the dashboard’s reinforcing loop. These include inconsistent data formats across departments, fragmented systems that cannot communicate with one another, ambiguous interpretations of legislation, variable data quality, unpredictable transfer processes, and commercial or licensing barriers. Each of these factors diminishes the accuracy, granularity or timeliness of the information feeding into the dashboard. As a result, the positive feedback loop cannot achieve its intended effects: the dashboard becomes costly to maintain, and insufficiently current or precise to act on with confidence, because it is persistently deprived of the reliable and available data it needs to remain effective and efficient. Crucially, many local authorities are trying to crack this nut independently, each in their own way, yet all are butting up against structural conditions beyond their control which prevent them from attaining their goal of granular — ideally, household-level — and accurate targeting.

Taken together, the CLD depicts a system with clear potential for cumulative and system-wide improvement — but only if the upstream barriers that disrupt the reinforcing loop are considered. Without a framework that can better facilitate consistent, lawful and interoperable pathways for data to move across services, even the best designed dashboard becomes costly and fragile, absorbing large amounts of local effort while delivering less accuracy and insight than intended. This is why CPAF projects repeatedly encountered limits that could not be overcome through local innovation alone: the viability of the dashboard depends on a strategic framework that resolves the structural fragmentation around it.

Relationships with the other capacities

Key interrelationships and influences noted between the Strategic Data and Policy System and the other capacities, are as follows.

• Joined-up Leadership and Coordination (blue). An effective dashboard could play an integral role in this loop by helping partners see where to focus their joint effort and limited resources for maximum effect, and then showing them whether it worked. When that happens, confidence in collaboration grows, and the whole system coheres and becomes more coordinated.

• Ongoing Dialogue with Families and Frontline Practice (green). Lived-experience / interdisciplinary panels appear directly within the central reinforcing loop, where they help refine indicators, simplify the interface, and ensure categories reflect real lived conditions. Their involvement keeps the dashboard anchored in reality rather than in assumption or technical abstraction. When the system aligns closely and confidently with the practical needs of frontline workers and families, it becomes useful and used.

• Trusted, Continuous Support in Communities (yellow). Ideally, contributing data that allows the dashboard to be validated and corrected, and providing a dynamic real-time simulation of the state of child poverty in an area. This can include contextual verification and feedback to developers from frontline workers — such as is seen with the West Lothian Round 2 project. However, data generated via referrals and income maximisation must currently travel through a fragmented and inconsistent data environment before it can inform the dashboard, and rarely to the granularity sufficient for confident action.

Across these interactions, the CLD shows that the Shared Intelligence and Rules that Enable Action draws energy from the other capacities — but it also depends on a strategic framework capable of resolving the upstream structural constraints.

Key levers (what actually moves the system)

These can be considered as guiding design principles which have been agreed across all stakeholders in the West Lothian Project for their dashboard / tracker.

1. Simple, accurate and affordable tools. Dashboards and trackers must be easy for practitioners to use, accurate enough to trust, and financially viable for local authorities and partners to maintain. Tools that are overly complex, expensive, or difficult to navigate rapidly lose value.
2. Continuous analyst–frontline dialogue. Regular, iterative exchange between analysts and frontline workers is essential for validating data, correcting boundary errors, and refining indicators. This ongoing calibration keeps dashboards aligned with real-world conditions and prevents drift into technical abstraction.
3. Training and accessible digital design. Staff need straightforward training and interfaces that make it easy to record, interpret and act on information. Confidence in using the tool is as important as the tool itself.

Barriers and constraints (what holds the system back)

The barriers and constraints set out below are common themes across the CPAF Projects, with the West Lothian Round 2 project providing perhaps the best forensic analysis.

• Fragmented and incompatible systems. CRMs and referral systems operate on different technical standards, preventing vital information from being combined into a shared picture of need. This limits dashboard accuracy and increases the burden on staff.
• Ambiguity in legislation and data-protection rules. Differing interpretations of lawful data use across departments create hesitation, slow down data-sharing, and limit what can be included in local dashboards.
• Variable dataset quality. Essential datasets — whether local, national or third-party — often contain gaps, inconsistencies or outdated categories. This reduces granularity and weakens partners’ confidence in the underlying information.
• Unpredictable or labour-intensive data transfer processes. Manual extraction, cleaning and reformatting take significant staff time and introduce delays, degrading the timeliness of dashboard insight.
• Commercial and licensing barriers. Restrictions on data access or system integration, including the “black box” nature of some vendor products, limit transparency and prevent councils from adapting or improving their tools.

Together, these constraints hinder the reinforcing loop at the centre of the CLD: dashboards struggle to stay current, simple or accurate, even when local teams invest considerable effort in their development.

What this delivers when it works

When frontline data loops are strong, an evolving, continuously accurate dashboard enables effective targeting and timely action. Practitioners can respond quickly, and families experience visible follow-through. Confidence grows at both ends: workers and partners buy into, use and trust their tools; families trust that disclosing need leads to tangible help. When data can also flow reliably across services, partners can coordinate their efforts more effectively around the same shared intelligence. In this way, the system becomes adaptive — able to identify and engage new or unmet needs at a fine-grained local level, while maintaining and tracking continuity of presence in income-maximisation support. Conversely, without frontline validation, a dashboard can quickly become inefficient, unreliable, unused or obsolete.

3. CRM Data Sharing & Integration: Enablers & Constraints

This level captures how information moves within and between organisations. It shows why even excellent frontline data loses power when CRM systems do not talk to each other. See Figure 7 within the supporting documents section.

What the system contains

The CLD in Figure 7 (see supporting documents section) represents structural dynamics that can hamper efforts to share data and integrate CRM systems between partners and teams. The context, familiar to many, is the “invisible infrastructure” of discrete CRM systems, legacy processes and siloed policies that sits beneath everyday service delivery. Each agency, service and function has its own systems architecture, rules and constraints, which have evolved in response to specific remits and aims; connecting easily across organisational boundaries was never a design consideration. Yet for many Local Authority departments — for example, Customer Services and Financial Inclusion — the data held on service users may entail a very high degree of overlap.

Against this backdrop, the variables in the pink oval represent the structural forces that constrain even well-intentioned attempts to join things up locally. These loops illustrate a recurring dynamic: when the underlying systems are fragmented, and no shared strategic authority or framework exists to support alignment, local teams that attempt their own fixes to bridge the gaps, can inadvertently compound the problem. Workarounds can be effective in the short term, but because fixes occur within discrete data systems, ultimately, they may unintentionally increase incompatibility across the wider structure and move further away from the broader possibility of effective unification.

The CLD shows how this can become a self-reinforcing cycle. Local fixes lead to greater capacity complexity; complexity makes integration harder; this increases pressure on frontline and coordinating teams; and under pressure, workarounds are abandoned or more complexity created. Short-term funding cycles and administrative burden amplify this pattern by reducing the time and stability needed to invest in long-term solutions. The result is a system where every local effort to improve integration risks making the overall structure more fragmented and fragile.

Key levers (what actually moves the system)

1. Shared strategic direction for data integration – senior buy-in to common identifiers and interoperability standards.
2. Investment in linking layers rather than isolated products – e.g., APIs or middleware that enable systems to communicate.
3. Sustained resourcing beyond project cycles to maintain upgrades, staff capacity, and training.
4. Cross-departmental governance that includes data officers, analysts, and service leads in one forum.

What this delivers when it works

Integrated organisational data systems can create the conditions for collective intelligence. Everyone sees the same picture of local need, duplication falls, and time spent collecting data turns into time acting on it. Without strategic integration, however, team-level efforts at cross-system working often fail or rely on complex, unsustainable workarounds. Each service becomes more of an island; evidence fragments, families repeat their stories, and drift replaces prevention — undermining the possibility of a truly unified system.

CPAF projects: key points, examples & evidence

Evidence across CPAF projects shows that effective local action on child poverty depends not on any single capacity operating in isolation, but on the reinforcement between collaboration, enabling conditions, relational practice, and shared intelligence. Where these elements aligned, projects were able to move beyond pilot activity towards more coherent and sustained system change; where they did not, progress was slower and more fragile.

At the foundation was a culture that sustained collaboration over time.

Projects that were able to align partners around a shared purpose — spanning education, employability, advice, housing, health and the third sector — reported fewer delays and greater efficiency in delivery. This culture was rarely self-sustaining without dedicated coordination. In several CPAF projects, including Aberdeen City Council’s Round 2 project, a Child Poverty Coordinator played a critical role in convening partners, resolving tensions, and maintaining momentum, ensuring that services felt coherent to families rather than fragmented across organisational boundaries.

This collaborative culture was enabled — or constrained — by the wider organisational and funding environment. Flexible funding frameworks, particularly where timelines and outputs could adapt to learning, protected the continuity required for relationship-building, service optimisation and iterative improvement. Organisational scale and partnership history also mattered. Projects such as Scottish Borders and Dumfries & Galloway Councils’ Round 2 initiatives were able to mobilise quickly by building on long-standing relationships with Citizens Advice Bureaux, while Inverclyde Council’s Round 1 project illustrates how sustained partnership development over time can support wider system alignment.

Across CPAF, solutions were most effective where they were designed through continuous dialogue and co-design, rather than treated as time-limited engagement exercises. Day-to-day interaction with families and frontline practitioners functioned as a core system mechanism, helping horizontal systems remain grounded in lived reality and reducing the risks of poorly targeted or inefficient interventions. In NHS Grampian and Aberdeenshire Council’s Round 2 project, parents of children with complex health needs directly shaped tests of change at Aberdeen Royal Children’s Hospital, ensuring that service adaptations responded to real rather than assumed needs. Similarly, City of Edinburgh Council’s Round 2 project combined lived-experience and staff panels to inform stigma-reduction work, demonstrating how interdisciplinary feedback spaces supported rapid learning and adjustment.

Shared intelligence systems played a critical enabling role, but only where they were closely connected to practice. Projects such as West Lothian Council’s Round 2 initiative demonstrated the value of iterative feedback loops between analysts, frontline staff and lived experience panels. An interactive dashboard was developed, tested and refined through live use: thresholds were adjusted to reflect community boundaries; practitioners fed back on usability; and the model evolved accordingly. Comparable feedback loops were evident in Midlothian Council’s Round 1 project and East Lothian and Stirling Councils’ Round 2 projects, where on-the-ground insight informed strategic planning. By contrast, where datasets were unreliable or poorly aligned — as highlighted by the use of CACI data in West Lothian Round 2 and Argyll & Bute Round 1 — progress slowed and confidence in shared tools was undermined.

Relational continuity in communities emerged as a further reinforcing factor. Projects consistently showed that trusted, ongoing presence enabled deeper engagement over time: families initially approached outreach staff with small queries, later seeking more holistic support. This was particularly evident in the Scottish Borders Council Round 2 project, where CAB advisors embedded in food pantries and early years settings became trusted intermediaries. Informal networks amplified impact as families shared positive experiences through word-of-mouth, extending reach beyond formal referral routes. Continuity also enabled whole-family awareness, allowing practitioners to identify intersecting issues — such as debt, disability, domestic abuse or childcare barriers — and coordinate responses. Examples from Stirling Council’s Round 2 project and the NHS Tayside and Dads Rock Round 2 project illustrate how sustained relationships supported improvements in both child and wider household wellbeing.

Crucially, these relational systems were strengthened by horizontal and data-enabled feedback loops. Joint visits, shared case discussions and integrated referral pathways distributed responsibility for action across partners and supported collective problem-solving, as seen in the partnership underpinning the Scottish Borders Round 2 project. Where frontline insight fed back into data systems, dashboards became more accurate and actionable. West Lothian Council’s evolving dashboard illustrates how anonymised practitioner insights improved targeting and supported proactive outreach, while ongoing refinement by the Improvement Service — informed by lived experience feedback — helped balance analytical precision with practical simplicity.

Across projects, this interaction between relational continuity and shared intelligence highlighted a key balancing force: the efficiency of sustained presence versus the cost of discontinuation. While maintaining outreach can appear resource-intensive, CPAF evidence — particularly from the Scottish Borders Round 2 project — shows that ending activity too early carries far higher costs, including the loss of trust, place-based knowledge and informal networks, and the need to rebuild from scratch if funding resumes later.

Taken together, CPAF projects demonstrate that collaboration, enabling conditions, co-designed practice and shared intelligence operate as a mutually reinforcing system. Where these capacities aligned, local areas were better able to coordinate action, target support, learn quickly and sustain progress; where they did not, fragmentation persisted and system gains remained difficult to embed.

Cross-System Learning and Conclusion

Across all four capacities, viability depends on reinforcing feedback loops across boundaries:

• Data insight enables more efficient and effective horizontal coordination.
• Joined-up leadership and coordination provides the fertile structure for true partnership and co-production.
• Trusted and continuous presence in communities, in turn, generates richer data, ongoing learning, and partnership momentum.

Projects that actively connect two or more systems show the strongest prospects for sustainability and systemic influence. These diagrams therefore should not be read as independent or linear. They represent embedded and interacting systems, whose collective strength determines whether local approaches to reducing child poverty are short-term projects or durable, self-reinforcing systems of change.

Taken together, the four capacities and their feedback dynamics explain why some CPAF approaches generated sustained momentum while others remained fragile or time-limited. The evidence indicates that sustainability is not primarily a function of individual projects or short-term outputs, but of whether local systems can hold coordination, trust, dialogue and shared intelligence in a mutually reinforcing relationship over time. Where these capacities align, local areas are better able to target support, reduce duplication, learn quickly, and adapt in ways that remain humane and cost-effective. Where they do not, fragmentation persists and gains erode as relationships, learning and operational coherence are repeatedly reset. This systems perspective provides the analytical basis for Section 5’s conclusions on what needs to be strengthened and developed.