Fairer Futures Partnerships Islands Communities Impact Assessment (ICIA)

1. Step one – develop a clear understanding of your objectives

Introduction to Fairer Future Partnerships (FFPS)

The Fairer Futures Partnerships (FFP) contribute to the Scottish Government’s aim of ending child poverty through local initiatives focused on tests of change and systems reform, with a view to longer-term scale and sustainability of approach.

The FFP programme is intended to support families experiencing poverty and aims to enable them to access services they may not have access to otherwise, providing holistic support that can help address poverty over the long-term. Also likely to be key partners in the programme are local authorities, health boards and third sector delivery partners, including grassroots community organisations.

The FFP has expanded to a total of 16 Local Authority partnerships - one of these partnerships includes an Island Community, Shetland. As part of the further expansion of this work, Adopt and Adapt funding is also being made available to all non-FFP Local Authorities. This funding is provided to support Councils’ efforts to access and engage with the FFP learning programme and to embed relevant learning in their local work on child poverty. Eligible Local Authorities will include the remaining Island Communities of Scotland.

We expect and encourage local variation in the approach to service change; this ensures that the FFP approach in each local area is led by local experts and takes into account local differences, including specific Island Community considerations. This place-based approach is supported by research published by Scotland’s Rural College in 2023 which noted the diversity of socio-economic performance and drivers of change across rural and island areas and emphasised the importance of future policy initiatives in recognising those differences, utilising place-based approaches ^[1]

To support the work of the FFPs further, we have worked with partners to identify some key features that we expect to be important aspects of the approach taken in all partnerships. These are:

• Locally driven, targeted tests of change, focused on tackling child poverty and the drivers of poverty
• Strong emphasis on place, using the Place Principle
• Community voice and relationship-based approach
• Reforming services to put people & families first (drawing on relevant principles & approaches, e.g. National Principles of Holistic Whole Family Support, GIRFE, GIRFEC, the Place Principle, relational, wellbeing, no wrong door, etc.)
• Emphasis on prevention
• More effective use and sharing of data
• Multi-agency and cross-sector delivery
• Value for money and designing for sustainability
• Learning and sharing knowledge

Additionally, the overarching focus of this work is on testing and learning how services in specific places can better wrap around a family and deliver the bespoke package a family needs – an approach referred to as “Whole Family Support”. This includes systems and service redesign, with a range of relevant services working together, across childcare, education, health and social care, housing, employment, the third sector and beyond.

In summary, the FFP programme aims to develop practical examples and tools to support more effective service delivery that can be used in other parts of Scotland. This will include sharing Island-specific learning (from the Shetland FFP) with other Island Communities, whilst still recognising local differences. We will also take lessons back into the Scottish Government to continually improve the way we design policy nationally. This model will be supported by the work of our learning partners (SPIRU and the Improvement Service).