Fairer Futures Partnership Programme: evaluation strategy

Theory of Change for the Fairer Futures Partnerships

A Theory of Change (ToC) explains what a policy or intervention is intended to achieve and how it will contribute to outcomes in the short and longer-term. The FFP Theory of Change identifies inputs, activities and short, medium and long-term desired outcomes from the FFP programme, divided into outcomes for families and outcomes for policy and practice (recognising that these are interconnected), as set out below in the logic model below (Figure 2).

The key long-term outcomes in the Theory of Change for families include:

• Higher family incomes and reduced child poverty
• Sustained improvements in health and wellbeing
• Fewer families needing crisis interventions
• Families empowered & equipped to independently seek practical, informational, social, and financial assistance to improve their circumstances

The long-term outcomes for policy and practice include:

• Place-based partnership working (across Scottish Government, local government and the third sector) is embedded
• Person-centred, joined up support services are the norm
• We see a shift from crisis to preventative spend
• New local approaches are self-sustaining via savings in the system

Through linking inputs, activities, intermediate (short and medium-term) outcomes and long-term outcomes, the Theory of Change also identifies pathways by which the long-term outcomes will be achieved. Some illustrative pathways are set out in more detail in Box 1.

Box 1: Example Pathways in the FFP programme Theory of Change

1. Pathway to higher family incomes and reduced child poverty

Through a range of activities at the local level, including delivery of holistic, family-centred, preventative support, better multi agency collaboration and use of data to improve targeting, there will be more awareness of support, more engagement in support services and greater trust in the support provided among families at risk of poverty, especially among families who were less well-reached previously (short-term outcomes).

This, in turn, should result in improved finances for these families, through additional benefit take-up, take-up of grants and/or cost reductions, as well as improved wellbeing and, for some people, engagement in employability activity or training/education (medium-term outcomes).

Over the longer-term, this should result in people who have been supported moving into sustained work, resulting in higher incomes (long-term outcomes).

2. Pathway to shift from crisis to preventative spend

Scottish Government support to local partnerships in the form of funding, expertise, facilitation and unblocking national-level barriers (activities) enables changes in behaviour and culture locally that support improved partnership working and the development of new models of whole family support (short-term outcomes).

Testing and trialling these approaches, and the sharing of learning, enables successful models to be scaled up and embedded across local systems (medium-term outcomes).

Scaling up enables more families at risk of poverty to be reached and for families’ potential crises to be averted through preventative interventions. This should enable savings in the system from reduced use of crisis support to be evidenced over the longer-term (long-term outcomes).

These examples show simple pathways to long-term outcomes, but in practice pathways are more complex than this, with multiple interacting factors that can affect a person’s journey towards long-term outcomes, as well as affecting ‘the journey’ taken by the system towards the desired policy and practice outcomes. The Theory of Change for the FFP programme identifies some of the key contextual conditions (assumptions) that are required for pathways to be successful, as well as some of key risks that can knock people or services/systems off course, as shown in Figure 2, although in reality there will be many more factors than this that will interact to affect outcomes.

The Theory of Change presented here is a starting point and should be seen as a living document that will be added to and built on as the programme develops and evolves. It is intended to provide a framework, primarily for the national evaluation of the programme - which will aim to evidence the key steps in the Theory of Change – but should also serve as a useful resource for partners designing local-level monitoring and evaluation work, where similar outcomes will be sought.