Child poverty pathfinders in Dundee and Glasgow: phase two evaluation - summary report

Dundee key findings

Reach and engagement of families

In its first two years, 1,277 people had some level of contact with the Dundee pathfinder. Around 1 in 5 of these (21%) were parents with dependent children from Linlathen and Mid Craigie – the target area, but the pathfinder also supported people without children (56% of the total) and people from outside the target geographic area (63% of the total, including some with children and some without). Parents from Linlathen and Mid Craigie tended to have more contact with key workers outside of the drop-in and over a longer period than did Linlathen and Mid Craigie clients without dependent children. This indicates that pathfinder support has been more focused on this ‘core’ group of Linlathen/Mid Craigie parents.

However, the high level of demand at the drop-ins from both people without children and from people outside the target area highlights the level of unmet need for support and raises considerations around resourcing when a service is open to anyone. There was a lack of consensus among professional stakeholders in Dundee over the extent to which the pathfinder should have been more exclusively focused on families with children in Linlathen and Mid Craigie, or whether this conflicts with a ‘no wrong door’ approach of trying to support people who need it wherever they present.

Parents supported by the pathfinder include very high proportions of lone parents and parents with a disability or health condition. Around a quarter of parents had three or more children. This indicates the pathfinder was, at a minimum, successful in reaching some family types identified as being at higher risk of poverty. (Data on other priority family types is not available.)

Factors viewed as facilitating families’ engagement with the Dundee pathfinder included:

• The targeted outreach/door-knocking. The use of Council Tax Reduction data to identify specific families most likely to benefit from support was seen as effective in identifying and reaching families less likely to seek out support themselves and the proactive contact by key workers was felt to be important in making the support seem more accessible and approachable. However, precisely quantifying the impact of this outreach is difficult, as the monitoring data lacks information on the number or outcomes of calls at people’s homes.
• The location of the weekly drop-in in the centre of the community. The drop-in was felt to be well-attended, with an average attendance of 24 people on Tuesdays from October 2022 to early October 2024.
• The skills and characteristics of the key worker team, who were seen as approachable, non-judgemental, reliable, and as understanding the community and their needs.
• The fact support is offered face-to-face, which was particularly valued by parents, reflecting literacy issues and issues around confidence and anxiety around speaking to service providers over the phone.

Barriers to engagement included:

• A perception that the drop-in could be busy and lacked privacy
• The capacity of other services, leading to long waits for support and a concern that this could result in disengagement by some families; and
• Challenges engaging families with ‘no work-related requirements’ on their Universal Credit, due to anxiety that it might impact on their benefit eligibility if they engaged with employability support.

Impacts for families

The qualitative evidence from parents on their experiences of support from the pathfinder was overwhelmingly positive. It included many examples of what they perceived as transformative change to their financial, social or emotional circumstances as a result of the support they had received from the pathfinder, rooted in the trusting relationships they had formed with the key workers. This supports the scope for this approach to help families address their immediate needs and, for those who are able, to take positive steps towards employability and/or a more financially and emotionally stable situation. There were, however, some families for whom employment might not be a realistic end goal due to complex long-term disabilities or health conditions.

There was a lack of consensus among stakeholders regarding whether the pathfinder had maintained the right balance between a focus on employment outcomes or on wider outcomes for families (such as confidence and wellbeing) – although there was agreement around its broader aim of helping families overcome barriers to improving their social and financial situations and to move out of poverty on a sustainable basis. There was also a lack of consensus around realistic timescales for achieving these different outcomes for families.

Financial situation and benefits

The monitoring data collected by the Dundee pathfinder indicates that around half of clients (52% of all clients, 46% of Linlathen and Mid Craigie families with children) had been referred for support or advice relating to benefits or finances. This included being supported with accessing Better Off Calculations, as well as support from DWP, Social Security Scotland or Welfare Rights. Monitoring data on the level of benefit gains is likely to be unreliable, since the pathfinder is reliant on clients self-reporting back to key workers the outcome of any new/additional benefit applications they may make. However, in terms of other (non-benefit) financial support, around half of clients were recorded as having gained grants or in-kind goods applied for through the pathfinder (e.g. access to fuel vouchers, furniture or clothing). The average ‘non-benefit’ financial gain recorded was £419, rising to £630 for Linlathen and Mid Craigie clients with dependent children.

Parents interviewed for the evaluation were positive about the impact of the pathfinder on their financial situation, reporting outcomes including increased income from benefits, reduced debt, and improved ability to afford necessities for their families.

Employability

A relatively small proportion of clients were recorded in the monitoring data as entering work following engagement with the pathfinder (6% of all clients, 9% of Linlathen and Mid Craigie clients with dependent children) although, again, it should be noted that this is based on self-reporting of outcomes by clients. However, qualitative interviews show that there were parents who had moved closer to employment with pathfinder support even if they had not yet found a job. Parents reported that the pathfinder had helped build their confidence and encouraged them to see employment as a viable option, as well as providing support with applying for jobs, courses or volunteering. Parent and professional interviews also highlighted the very significant barriers some families faced to accessing work in the short-term, particularly relating to health and caring responsibilities.

Family wellbeing and capabilities

The pathfinder was also felt to have had positive impacts on families' wider health and wellbeing through providing access to financial support and goods, referrals to appropriate services, support to engage with community activities, and direct support and encouragement provided by the key workers. Parents gave examples where they felt the pathfinder had made a transformative difference to their physical or mental health, confidence, and emotional stability.

Empowerment and resilience

In terms of the medium to longer-term aim of empowering families to resolve issues themselves, without ongoing intensive key worker support, the evidence was mixed. On the one hand, there was some evidence that other services felt they were benefitting from the trusting relationships the pathfinder had fostered with clients, and families also reported gaining some skills and confidence around navigating other services. However, there were also parents who felt they would want or need support from the pathfinder key workers longer-term. Some professional stakeholders expressed concern about possible ‘dependency’ on the pathfinder and around an appropriate ‘exit strategy’ for reducing the level of support.

Facilitators and barriers to positive impact

In addition to the factors identified earlier as facilitating engagement, other factors seen as helping facilitate positive impacts for families were:

• the multi-organisational background of the key worker team, which enabled knowledge sharing and easy cross-referrals within the team where specialist knowledge was needed.
• working with other services (such as the school-aged childcare team and the Linlathen Fairness Initiative) to jointly support and identify opportunities for families.

Perceived barriers to the pathfinder having as much of a positive impact as it might have had on some families included:

• structural barriers (particularly wider benefits levels and rules, as well as the local job market)
• barriers relating to the specific needs of the target group in Linlathen and Mid Craigie, including the capacity of wider services to provide support (particularly with complex health issues)
• capacity within the pathfinder team (with a concern raised by stakeholders that the level of demand from outside the ‘core’ target group may have diluted the support the team could offer to families in the target area), and
• barriers to data sharing between services, which were felt to duplicate effort and therefore reduce the resource available for supporting families. For example, the inability of key workers from different partner organisations to share data electronically (or at all) meant they were unable to easily check what another agency had already done for a client.

System change

Professional stakeholders mentioned three main areas in which it was hoped the Dundee pathfinder would influence the wider system of services and support for families in or at risk of poverty: improved data sharing; development of new approaches in employability services for families further from employment; and shaping wider principles and ways of working with families across partners.

On data sharing, progress towards more efficient processes for sharing data was seen as limited. The use of data for identifying families with no earned income and the agreement of a ‘Memorandum of understanding’ between DCC and DWP to enable some data sharing between key workers were positives. However, data sharing between key workers remained manual and Social Security Scotland were not covered by the data sharing agreement. A lack of permission to link data on clients electronically on a routine basis was also seen as hampering monitoring and evaluation.

Learning from the pathfinder was informing discussions and plans for future employability services in Dundee. A review of employability services was still ongoing when evaluation fieldwork took place, although subsequently learning from the pathfinder has supported the reorganisation of youth and adult employability services into one shared service based around a community model, with employability staff spending more time in communities rather than the city centre.

There was a strong perception among stakeholders that local partnership working had been strengthened by the pathfinder, and tentative evidence that this was starting to influence ways of working with families more widely in Dundee, for example via the establishment of other place-based drop-ins by organisations that had visited the pathfinder. However, while there were some perceived improvements in understanding between national partners, it was less clear that the pathfinder had yet made a significant difference to ways of working within these organisations. This was largely put down to areas of system change where national action or rule changes were felt to be needed (e.g. data sharing and rules or practices relating to those on Universal Credit with no work-related requirements).

Perceived facilitators of system change were:

• the operational team having had capacity and freedom to build relationships with a wide range of local partners, something which was felt to have been built into the pathfinder as a ‘test’ project
• strong relationships between the pathfinder and other local initiatives, and
• senior level strategic emphasis on the pathfinder.

Barriers to more significant system change were reported to have been:

• challenges around data sharing, as described above, which was viewed as a barrier to more transformative system change
• issues relating to the governance and leadership of the pathfinder, including questions raised by stakeholders about whether the pathfinder had been developed and implemented too quickly at the outset, lack of clarity over roles and responsibilities, and whether the governance structure had been right
• national level rules and legislation, for example relating to benefit rules.

Value for money

Value for money of the Dundee pathfinder is explored in two ways in the evaluation. First, there was an exploration of stakeholder views on:

• economy – whether the pathfinder was delivered at the minimum appropriate cost;
• efficiency – how efficiently it was delivered; and
• equity – how resources were distributed, including whether they were targeted on those most in need.

Second, a break-even model was developed to consider what level of outcomes would need to be achieved for the pathfinder to ‘break-even’ in terms of its costs over a particular period.

The estimated direct costs of the Dundee pathfinder over its first two years of operation were between £527,117 to £644,117 (depending on whether the costs of design and development workshops are included or excluded).

Stakeholders had mixed views on the costs of the pathfinder to date and on future resource implications. One view was that it was relatively low cost and had largely leveraged existing resources and partnerships. However, other stakeholders had concerns about its affordability in the long-term, and it was suggested that adjustments might need to be considered for longer-term sustainability if the pathfinder is to be scaled up. (It is possible, of course, that the pathfinder approach could lead to savings elsewhere in the system over the longer term, which might offset upfront costs, but capturing these was beyond the scope of this evaluation.) Specific ideas for reducing costs included making support more time-bound or more targeted (e.g. on people in specific geographic/demographic groups), sharing outreach activities across services, and/or adopting a mobile key worker model (where a team provides additional support in different geographic areas for a fixed period of time before moving on to other areas).

A number of barriers to maximising the efficiency of delivery were identified, including: limits on data sharing, particularly between key workers from different organisations; the speed of inception of the pathfinder, which was felt to have led to some missed opportunities to align with existing activities and plans; and questions around whether leadership and governance responsibilities and structures were as clear as they could have been.

In focusing on Linlathen and Mid Craigie, the pathfinder was clearly aimed at improving equity by focusing resources on one of the most deprived areas in Dundee (based on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation). However, some stakeholders raised questions over whether the pathfinder might have redistributed resources away from other areas where there is significant need. That said, when resources are limited, there is always going to be a trade-off when particular groups are targeted. There were also different views expressed on how to balance an open, ‘no wrong door’ approach of trying to support people who need it wherever they present with focusing sufficient resources on low-income families.

To inform understanding of how value for money might be more formally measured in future and of the scale of delivery/outcomes needed to achieve value for money (both in Dundee and for other place-based interventions with similar approaches), a ‘break-even’ model was created. This looks at how many individuals might need to achieve particular outcomes over a two-year period for the pathfinder to ‘break even’ given its costs. The model shows that given its costs, the following outcomes would need to be achieved in order for the Dundee pathfinder to break-even (the upper and lower numbers represent the number of outcomes needed using the upper and lower level of costs, as set out above):

• New job starts - 78-96 people moving from unemployment to a job of full time equivalent hours at the living wage
• Improved financial stability - 121-147 people moving from reporting that they are ‘just about getting by’ to ‘doing alright’
• Improved subjective wellbeing - 88-108 people reporting a 0.5 point increase in life satisfaction on a 10 point scale.

These different outcomes could, in practice, be combined in different ways to achieve the break-even point, as shown in the example below.

Example break-even scenario over 2 years (using lower estimated cost of Dundee pathfinder)

• 15 people gain new, full-time jobs;
• another 60 report significant improvements in financial stability; and
• a further 28 people report a 0.5-point increase in life satisfaction (or 56 people report a 0.25 point increase).

Due to the lack of quantitative data, no definitive assessment on whether the Dundee pathfinder broke even or not can be made. However, on the basis of the previously reported outcomes, this model confirms that it is unlikely the Dundee pathfinder would have broken even over two years based on job starts alone - which is unsurprising given the challenges reported by key workers around helping parents into employment. There is some very positive qualitative evidence of impacts of the pathfinder on people’s financial stability and subjective wellbeing, as reported above. However, a lack of quantitative data on this rules out a robust assessment of the size of these impacts and it is therefore not possible at this stage to draw conclusions as to whether the pathfinder would have broken even on these outcomes.

Finally, it should be noted that different views were expressed by pathfinder stakeholders on how value for money should be evidenced and when it might be appropriate to assess it. This highlights that there is no single, agreed definition of what ‘value for money’ means for a project like this, and a lesson for the future is that how this is defined and measured should be part of early and ongoing discussions between stakeholders.