Fairer Futures Partnership Programme: evaluation strategy

The evaluation journey so far

Evaluations have already been undertaken of the first phase of place-based partnerships, including the Social Innovation Partnership^[10], the Family Wellbeing Partnership in Clackmannanshire (FWP), and the Child Poverty Pathfinders in Dundee and Glasgow. The findings from the latter two evaluations are published alongside this strategy.

Social Innovation Partnership (SIP)

The SIP is a unique collaboration between the Scottish Government, the Hunter Foundation, social entrepreneurs and third sector organisations which began in 2016. It brings together and funds 13 SIP partners who work in communities with significant levels of poverty and disadvantage. The programme aims to help families increase their wellbeing and capabilities and in so doing promote social justice and help tackle poverty and inequality.

Family Wellbeing Partnership (FWP)

The FWP is a transformation partnership between Clackmannanshire Council and the Social Innovation Partnership (including Scottish Government and the Hunter Foundation) to test and embed wellbeing-and capability-enhancing approaches to service design and delivery. The integrated, collaborative approach aims to put the voice and agency of Clackmannanshire families and communities at the heart of decision-making, making it easier for people to access the support they need, when they need it.

Dundee Child Poverty Pathfinder

The Dundee pathfinder was established in 2022 as a collaboration between Dundee City Council, DWP, Scottish Government, Social Security Scotland and various local partners. At the heart of its approach is a place-based, relational key worker model, emphasising the tailoring of support to the unique needs of each family. It also includes targeted outreach via door-knocking informed by administrative data, and weekly multi-agency drop-in sessions.

Glasgow Child Poverty Pathfinder

The Glasgow pathfinder began in 2022 and has influencing and embedding ‘whole system change’ as its main focus. Key features have been the establishment of a multi-agency change team to drive forward system change and embedding a ‘no wrong door’ model across Glasgow, so that families can access person-centred, relational, holistic case management and support regardless of when, where and how they engage with services.

These evaluations focused on examining how the interventions were working and whether they were leading to any ‘systems change’; understanding the short to medium term impacts for families; and distilling learning from the approaches taken to inform the development, further implementation and expansion of these approaches in the current sites as well as in other local authorities.

There were a range of challenges faced in conducting comprehensive and robust impact evaluations of these initiatives. This was due to:

• the evolving nature of the interventions and their intended outcomes;
• the lengthy timeframe anticipated for many of the outcomes;
• the limited availability of local monitoring data; and
• limitations on the capacity of local teams to engage with the evaluations.

These are challenges that will continue to be faced for the evaluation of the FFP programme (and are common to many other ‘complex’ evaluations). We set out in a later section how the national evaluation will seek to address these challenges.

The key takeaway lessons from across these evaluations were:

• Innovative means of engagement can be effective in engaging those families previously not reached by support. This included using administrative data to identify those most in need; proactive outreach to people’s homes; use of local trusted venues and assets for delivery of support (e.g. community centres, schools); and engagement of communities in co-designing initiatives to meet their needs.
• Delivery of holistic support through trusted key workers, with support tailored to people’s needs and at the duration and pace set by them, is important in tackling immediate needs and setting people onto a pathway towards more sustained improvements in wellbeing and material circumstances.
• Join-up between different elements of support was critical to achievement of outcomes for families. In addition to the role of keyworkers, this also included physical co-location of support, such as through multi-agency drop-in centres or one stop shops, as well as funding key co-ordinating posts that facilitated service join up to tackle barriers more holistically (e.g. across childcare, training, wellbeing, employability)
• Innovative approaches to delivering employability support that were shown to have success included ‘intermediate labour market’ projects that provide a supported bridge to employment with a work placement, accompanied by additional training or support; and work with public sector employers to offer flexible working arrangements.
• Key barriers to achieving outcomes included: gaps in wider support services (particularly for complex health issues); limited job opportunities in local labour markets; and barriers relating to benefit rules (specifically, those on Universal Credit with no work-related requirements feeling unable to participate in employability activities for fear of losing benefits).
• Achieving change at the system level is complex and should be expected to take time. Factors that supported wider change across the system included supportive leadership at all levels (facilitated in some cases by ‘values-based leadership’) which gave frontline staff ‘permission’ to act differently; collaborative governance arrangements; specific resource dedicated to change capacity; regular communication across stakeholders to maintain momentum and motivation; flexible funding models; and developing shared accountability frameworks.

Alongside a theory-based impact evaluation, the evaluation of the Child Poverty Pathfinders also included a feasibility assessment for a quasi-experimental (QED) pilot study in Dundee only. This would provide a more robust assessment of medium-term impacts for families on employment and income, by enabling a comparison of outcomes for pathfinder participants with those for a control group using administrative data. A final decision on whether or not to go ahead with the QED pilot is still pending at the time of writing, and dependent on the outcome of negotiations between the Scottish Government, DWP, HMRC and Social Security Scotland over data access to facilitate this study. If the necessary agreements are reached and data is obtained, the QED pilot study will take place over 2025/26.