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

Glasgow key findings

Learning on reaching and supporting families

The evaluation of the Glasgow pathfinder took a ‘case study’ approach to learning about reach and impacts for families, drawing on examples of the pathfinder’s activities to date. It focused particularly on learning from: Glasgow Helps; the No Wrong Door network; Intermediate Labour Market (ILM) initiatives linked to the pathfinder; and early learning and reflections from the three ward-based ‘Demonstrations of Change’ (DoCs). These initiatives are described below, alongside key findings for each.

Glasgow Helps

Glasgow Helps, a support service for Glasgow citizens initially established during the pandemic, became part of the pathfinder and was an early mechanism for offering and demonstrating the value of a No Wrong Door approach in Glasgow - summarised as “the right support, in the right place, at the right time”. While most clients are supported (primarily by phone) with one-off or short-term advice, those who need ongoing support are allocated a ‘Holistic Support Officer’ (HSO), to work with them and address their needs.

Extracts from Glasgow Helps monitoring data shared with the evaluation team included demographic data for 300 HSO clients, of whom 44% had children aged up to 16. The data included relatively high proportions of minority ethnic families, but fewer families with disabled family members, babies, or young parents.

Qualitative interviews with parents^[5] support the view that Glasgow Helps has been able to help families who had not been able to access the support they needed via other routes. This was linked to providing accessible, flexible support, and building trusting relationships. Parent interviews also highlighted the potential for this approach to support people to move from dealing with immediate, short-term crisis needs to starting to address underlying issues, such as barriers to employment. The number of parents with before and after outcomes recorded in the monitoring data extract^[6] was relatively small. However, where the data was available, this showed a positive change, on average, relating to financial assistance, housing, utilities and bills and mental health.

Professionals highlighted that the success of Glasgow Helps in being able to provide holistic support has been dependent on the partnerships it has built, which in turn are supported by the NWD network established by the pathfinder. This has widened the range of services that Glasgow Helps can refer people to and relationships with other services have given Glasgow Helps staff the confidence that their outward referrals will meet families’ needs.

Barriers to positive impacts for families in Glasgow chimed with many of the issues identified in Dundee: challenges supporting parents with long-term health or caring-related barriers; issues of resource in the wider system, particularly around housing and mental health support; and barriers relating to the wider benefit system and cost of living. Challenges around how to avoid client ‘dependency’ were also recognised by stakeholders, as was balancing meeting demand with continuing to provide effective relationship-based support.

The No Wrong Door (NWD) network

The No Wrong Door network is a network of third and public sector partners that provide support to low-income families, aiming to create and embed ‘NWD’ ways of working across the network. At the time this evaluation took place, the NWD network was still determining how best to measure its impacts for families. However, interviews with network members provided examples where it was felt that the network was already facilitating quicker access to the right support for families. Pathfinder partners were also optimistic about the ability of the network to reach priority family groups at particular risk of poverty, with network members that already work closely with these groups seen as ‘extending the reach’ of other organisations in the network.

Intermediate Labour Market (ILM) programmes

ILM projects aim to bridge the gap between unemployment and employment by providing a work placement, often accompanied by additional training or support. While only a small number of ILM participants were interviewed for this evaluation, they highlight the potential for this approach to help people into more sustainable employment. The combination of linking parents (and others) to new job opportunities and offering ‘wrap-around’, holistic support to mitigate the specific barriers they face, was viewed very positively by clients and professionals.

Early learning from the Demonstrations of Change (DoCs) on targeting and reach

The new phase of the pathfinder/programme in Glasgow includes five ‘Demonstration of Change’ (DoC) projects. Given the relatively early stage of these DoCs, partners’ reflections focused particularly on processes for identifying and engaging their target groups.

The early experiences of the DoC projects highlight challenges and learning around how to target parents in or at risk of poverty. The use of data (via the Council’s Child Poverty Dashboard) has enabled the pathfinder to identify both precise areas and specific families most likely to benefit from support. This is seen as a significant step forward. However, there have been data protection challenges around using this data to contact families, which had delayed the start of the DoCs.

There was also a perception that, while this data was extremely beneficial, focusing efforts only on families identified in the data might miss other groups who could benefit, including working families who are not aware of their benefit entitlements and therefore might not be included in key datasets.

DoC leads were also aware of the complexity of families’ needs. Early learning from the first DoC was that the families they had engaged with to date had required more support than initially expected particularly around language barriers and financial literacy.

Early progress towards ‘whole system change’

There was a general consensus across stakeholders interviewed for this evaluation that Glasgow was taking the right approach to delivering long-term, sustainable system change. At the same time, it was recognised that it could be challenging to articulate clearly how the pathfinder was changing the system and to evidence progress. It was also unclear whether all stakeholders shared the same understanding of system change. This reflected the long-term nature, large scale and wide scope of the pathfinder’s system change plans. A tendency towards the use of jargon was also noted as a potential barrier to communicating its vision for system change.

While arguing that it is too early to be fully assessing system change outcomes, interviewees highlighted various areas of progress towards this. These included:

• Improved collaboration and partnership working, both facilitated by, and embodied in, the Multi Agency Change Team and No Wrong Door networks in particular. There are early signs of this leading to improved knowledge of services, greater trust between partners, and better referral pathways.
• Promotion of shared culture and values, including through the NWD network and its co-creation approach, wider activities to foster a shared sense of purpose and commitment to doing things differently, and supported by a Research Practice Collaboration with the University of Glasgow. Elements of the shared culture and values included: collaboration, coordination, a shared commitment to positive impact, transparency, respect, trust and putting the citizen at the centre of efforts to transform the system.
• Progress on embedding a No Wrong Door approach across a wide range of services, primarily through the work of the NWD network, which by late 2024 had expanded to 183 partners, primarily from the third sector but also from Registered Social Landlords and the public sector. In setting up the NWD network, organisations that worked with children and young people were targeted, although other organisations who expressed an interest were welcome to join.
• Understanding, and starting to fill, gaps in services, informed by the work of the data insights team, the NWD network, and Glasgow Helps, and expected to draw increasingly on citizen engagement through the DoCs.
• More effective use of data to identify where pathfinder activities should focus and contribute to identifying gaps in services and support for families.
• Funding flexibilities, with the development of a new Whole Family Early Intervention Fund for Glasgow that brings together separate Scottish Government funding streams seen as a significant achievement. It is hoped this will enable future spending to be more closely linked to evidence on need, rather than the requirements of individual funds.
• Shared accountability and performance management, through the role of the pathfinder in shaping the Glasgow Community Planning Partnership’s^[7] focus on ‘family poverty’ and ensuring that the Partnership’s associated Performance Management Framework is closely aligned with pathfinder goals.

Data sharing was an area where progress was felt to have been slower, although there had been some movement. Funding flexibility had also not progressed as far as some GCC stakeholders would have liked.

All of the pathfinder’s activities were considered to have collectively contributed to the system change achieved to date, but particular facilitators were felt to include:

• The capacity created by the Multi Agency Change Team to drive the vision and plan for achieving transformational change;
• The role of the No Wrong Door network in bringing partners together;
• The focus on culture change as both a system change aim and a facilitator of wider transformation. Examples of culture change identified included fostering a joint vision, a commitment to continual learning and reflection, and the permission to innovate and risk failures (which could be learned from); and
• Senior commitment and leadership from both Glasgow City Council and the Scottish Government.

Value for money

To date, the core costs of system change activity in Glasgow have been the cost of staff for the Multi Agency Change Team, as well as smaller costs for events and IT. Many other partners have also contributed to the system change activities of the pathfinder, but accurately measuring these costs is more challenging. It is also arguable that these partners are using existing resources in a different way, rather than incurring additional costs.

There was a strong belief among stakeholders that investment in the pathfinder would ultimately deliver efficiency savings, by reducing duplication of effort across services. However, this was largely seen as a future return on current investment. While there was some frustration with the pace of change and volume of meetings, there was also a recognition that taking time and involving multiple partners might lead to better outcomes in the long-term. There was also a clear sense that the pathfinder was fostering better use of data, which was helping to target resources where they were most needed (impacting on the ‘equity’ element of value for money).

There is no established approach to measuring or estimating the social or exchequer values of changes to a system. Further challenges include: difficulty attributing specific system change outcomes to the pathfinder programme (or to individual elements of it); agreeing what is in scope in terms of costs and drivers; and determining likely timeframes over which value for money might be realised.

Suggested principles for assessing the value for money of system change approaches like the Glasgow pathfinder include:

• Considering ‘value for money’ of system change in different ways across different time frames, including setting indicators of short- and medium-term progress towards the long-term vision
• In the early stages in particular, considering broader benefits beyond cost savings, recognising that it may take time for change to feed through into budgets reducing or stabilising
• Assessing value for money against the counterfactual of what is expected to happen in the future if the system is not reformed, rather than against the current system, and
• Adopting a mixed method approach, drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence since some aspects of system change (like culture change) are harder to ‘count’.

The full report includes a fuller discussion of potential value for money indicators.

The Performance Management Framework (PMF),^[8] developed by Glasgow Community Planning Partnership and facilitated by members of the MACT, includes various measures of relevance to assessing value for money of the pathfinder approach. These include: changes in the number of crisis grant applications and referrals; level of demand for debt-related services; and partner perceptions of whether the system is more joined up. Consideration should also be given as to what to use as a ‘counterfactual’ for measuring the impact of system change. This could include comparing actual demand and spend in the future with the level of demand and spend that was forecast prior to the system change. It could also include comparing trends in key outcome measures with trends for comparison areas (in Scotland or, potentially, England).