Tackling child poverty - six priority families concept: overview and guidance

4. Using the concept to inform monitoring and evaluation

Actively monitoring and assessing the impact of policies upon child poverty is an important factor in ensuring their effectiveness in tackling the barriers and challenges faced by families at risk of poverty, and ultimately in reducing child poverty.

In many cases, policies have specific evaluations in place to better understand the impact they are having. However, some policy evaluations may need adapting to better understand the contribution polices are making to reducing child poverty.

The child poverty evaluation framework intends to explain in detail how best to design a policy evaluation considering their impact on child poverty. It can be used as tool when starting to design an evaluative approach, or also to adapt an ongoing evaluation to have a greater focus on child poverty outcomes.

The framework is an open source that can be used by policy areas delivering interventions which will help to reduce child poverty by providing four key themes through which they can evaluate their policy in relation to child poverty. It sets out to create a shared understanding of how we measure the impact of individual policies on child poverty across various elements, including who the intended beneficiaries are of a policy and if these are being reached.

This framework presents first the overarching evaluation strategy on child poverty. This is relevant because the same hierarchy of evaluation will be used at an individual policy level. The overarching evaluation approach consists of three key elements:

1. Monitoring child poverty targets – relative poverty, absolute poverty, low income and material deprivation, persistent poverty

2. Monitoring the drivers of child poverty – income from employment, cost of living, income from social security and benefits in-kind

3. Assessing the impact of policies and external factors on child poverty and its drivers – including evaluation of policies and initiatives, as well as cumulative impact assessment of the combination of policies.

To support standardisation of data collection, the framework also provides some example question wording for collecting demographic information that allows identification of priority families and those other groups at increased risk of poverty, including by age, number of children in the house and parental status.

The framework also links to some helpful good practice examples of how child poverty outcomes can be embedded in logic models:

• Scottish Child Payment
• Disability benefits
• Scottish Attainment Challenge
• Early Learning and Childcare Expansion