Fairer Futures Partnership Programme: evaluation strategy

Background

As part of its mission to eradicate child poverty, the Scottish Government has set out a commitment to ensuring that children and families can access the services they need when and where they need them, through the provision of whole family support^[1]. This means the ability of services at a local level to ‘wrap themselves around’ and support families in or at risk of poverty according to their needs, building integrated, responsive services focused on improving lives. The Fairer Futures Partnerships (FFPs) are a key mechanism for delivering this commitment to whole family support. They involve national and local government and partners working together, supported by targeted change funding, to take forward locally-driven, place-based tests of change to tackle child poverty, with a view to scaling and spreading successful approaches across Scotland.

This commitment responds to evidence^[2] showing that the landscape of services supporting families at risk of poverty is complex and can be difficult to navigate, and that better integration across services, including housing, education, employability and health, is needed to support families to move out of poverty. The Scottish Government’s 2nd Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan, 2022-26, Best Start, Bright Futures^[3], recognised this challenge. It committed to ensuring that support systems work for the people who need them most, by bringing together partners in ‘pathfinder areas’ to refine, test, adapt and scale different approaches to providing person-centred support; and by working with local authorities to help create the conditions for a transition to more enabling models of support.

Building on the learning from the first phase of this work - the Social Innovation Partnership (SIP)^[4], two child poverty pathfinders in Dundee and Glasgow, and the Family Wellbeing Partnership in Clackmannanshire - the 2024-5 Programme for Government^[5], announced the expansion of the approach - now called Fairer Futures Partnerships - into five new areas (North Ayrshire, East Ayrshire, Perth and Kinross, Inverclyde and Aberdeen City). Subsequently, in May 2025, the Scottish Government committed to expanding the partnerships further, to Shetland, North Lanarkshire and Fife, alongside work to identify further adopters over the coming year^[6].

Key aspects of the FFP approach include:

• introducing person-centred, relational, holistic services based around ‘no wrong door’ principles;
• a shift to a social contract with communities that builds local capability and wellbeing;
• shifting the focus away from crisis intervention towards a more preventative approach by default.

While each partnership differs in its specific activities and tests of change, collectively the partnerships include activities that target each of the three key drivers of child poverty directly (increasing income from employment, increasing income from benefits, and reducing the costs of living), as well as focusing on enhancing wellbeing and capabilities and tackling wider barriers that may prevent people from taking steps to improve their incomes (for example, improving confidence, health and wellbeing, and engagement with and trust in support). This is shown in Figure 1, below. The FFPs’ focus on transforming support systems so that they more effectively meet the needs of families at risk of poverty also aims to ensure that changes are sustainable and that poverty is reduced over the longer-term.