Michelle Kennedy Child Poverty Sector Specialist 1

Michelle KennedyChild Poverty Sector Specialist

1

Strong and supportive leadership : political and organisational

A common agreed understanding across partnerships of what child poverty means

A vision of how to eradicate and mitigate poverty in your area based on agreed principles

A strategy that encompasses all partners within the local area, involves families and is clear and easy to understand

Creating a whole area child poverty strategyWhat do we know about what works?

Build on existing strong partnership working and leadership

Ensure consistent understanding and definition of child poverty as low income

Take specific action to raise awareness and capacity of local partners to tackle the most common gaps in provision

Use and share data to carry out joint needs analysis with partners to identify those families at greatest risk of poverty.

Use the Child Poverty Act building blocks to check you have all the bases covered

How do we do it?

Develop a strategy that is outcome based on local priorities

Ensure your strategy embeds child poverty targets in mainstream work, such as service planning, training and development plans, commissioning strategies

Co-locate services / outreach where possible I.e children’s centres, schools, job centres, health clinics etc

Use common assessment frameworks and / or impact assessments

Tackle in- work poverty : financial inclusion and support including take up of tax credits and benefits

Pool and align budgets and resources

How do we do it?

Clearly agreed , understood and shared terminology and definitions

Strong and supportive political leadership at local level

An appropriate degree of area- level autonomy to design and deliver strategies to meet local needs

A risk-taking ethos to challenge existing practices

Open channels of communication and trust

Accessible and informative data

Community action and citizen led participation

Involvement of the full range of services and organisations in the delivery of the strategy

Facilitators

Lack of joined up priorities and direction

Consultation fatigue and tokenistic representation

Child poverty agenda becoming isolated

Assuming that projects are the only answer

Lack of robust and high quality data and analysis to support decision making and resource allocation

Lack of long – term development time and planning

Barriers

Agree with partners and clients what the outcomes, targets and performance indicators will be.

Use qualitative and quantitative measures

Ensure outcome measures are focussed on children and families

Create strong links between assessment, planning and action

Design monitoring so that it can be used to assess if and how the intervention has worked

Revise following monitoring and assessment

Work with partners to plan and improve data collection

Assessing and monitoring the strategy

What support is there?

Coordinated Offer of

Support for Local

Partners

Child Poverty

Unit Website ResearchCPU updates

Data ToolPilot info

Child Poverty Toolkit

Save the Children

C4EO Support &

Sector Specialist

s

Take Up

Taskforce Report

and Materials

Beacons And more…

active personalised

support

Good Practice Examples

Online Resources

core offer of support

LGID

Child Poverty

Community of Practice

Child PovertyEverybody’s Business