Fairer Futures Partnership Programme: evaluation strategy

Current evaluation priorities

Over the first year of the strategy, the main focus of activity will be an evaluation of the FFP expansion areas, which is currently being commissioned. This will build on the previous evaluation findings, and focus on the effectiveness of the overall programme, including the role of Scottish Government in developing and supporting place-based collaborations. It will enhance our understanding of:

• how local partnerships are effecting systems change;
• what contribution they are making to changes in family support systems and to outcomes for families; and
• how resources are being used within the programme.

It will also pay close attention to outstanding gaps in the evidence and areas where greater understanding would help to inform future delivery and policy, such as the conditions required for scaling up FFP activity, and the longer term outcomes from this approach for families’ material circumstances, and for wider systems change in public services.

Alongside the commissioned evaluation, other activity over the coming year will include:

• supporting the development and embedding of a cross-SG outcomes framework for whole family support, to better evidence longer-term outcomes from the FFPs;
• supporting local partners with guidance to improve monitoring data and evidencing outcomes;
• pursuing the QED pilot study (subject to data availability), looking at longer-term employment and income impacts from the Pathfinder in Dundee, and testing the potential for this approach to be used for measuring impacts in other areas;
• developing an approach to better understand the value for money of the FFPs, for example by identifying a range of relevant data sources to measure and value impacts; and
• supporting local partners in understanding the comparative costs and resources that go into new approaches, compared to ‘business as usual’.

Further research and evaluation work relating to the FFP programme will subsequently be developed as needs emerge and evolve. This strategy provides a framework for any future work by setting out a Theory of Change for the programme and a set of high level evaluation questions. It is intended to be helpful for a range of partners beyond Scottish Government in guiding research and evaluative work, with the overall intention of helping to foster an evidence-based culture, with monitoring, evaluation and learning built in to place-based partnerships from the start. It is intended that the strategy will be updated in the future as the programme develops and as policy needs change.