Policy, Projects and Participation Manager gives thoughts on Whole Family Support
As Scotland develops a national approach to Whole Family Support, our Policy, Projects and Participation manager shares practical insights on what is needed to deliver meaningful, long-term change for children, young people and families.
Whole Family Support is critical to reducing child poverty, and to mitigating its impacts. The Scottish Government’s Programme for Government commits to progressing an integrated Whole Family Support programme. Children in Scotland is working with the Scottish Government to ensure that third sector knowledge and expertise inform the design and delivery of this programme. As part of this work, we have gathered evidence from three key networks: the TSI Children’s Services Network, the Children’s Sector Strategic and Policy Forum, and our Members Forum. Across these networks, there was consensus on several key themes:
What Whole Family Support means
Whole Family Support should be defined through a shared set of principles that enables organisations to work creatively, collaboratively and flexibly to meet families where they are. The evidence suggests that interventions in the pre-birth to 3 period, emphasised in the Programme for Government, are highly cost-effective and often have the most preventative impact. However, a preventative approach can be taken at any stage in a child’s life or a family’s circumstances.
Leadership and system change
Whole Family Support relies on strong alignment of priorities across agencies and greater coordination of resources and budgets. Community Planning Partnerships, Children’s Services Planning Partnerships and Health and Social Care Partnerships, with strong representation from TSIs and the local third sector, can be utilised to strengthen collaboration and multiagency working. Collective leadership, with a shared vision and shared values, and investment at a strategic level, are essential to enable the conditions for this type of change.
Partnership working
Families often need to access multiple services concurrently or at different times, over time. Whole Family Support therefore depends on strong partnership working across services. To optimise the impact of these services, the third sector must be recognised as an equal strategic partner in the Scottish Government’s proposed Partnership Agreement.
Data sharing is a key barrier to collaboration. Improving information-sharing, building confidence around GDPR, and developing clearer shared practices can begin to address this challenge.
Delivery and measuring success
There is a risk that Whole Family Support could become narrowly judged against child poverty outcomes. However, deprivation is a multi-faceted problem, not just a financial condition.
Whole Family Support responds to this complex problem as part of a highly complex system, making it difficult to attribute outcomes to a single intervention: attempts to demonstrate direct causality are likely to oversimplify the reality of families’ experiences.
Furthermore, current reporting systems often struggle to demonstrate the value of prevention, early intervention, long-term wellbeing improvements, and the unintended positive consequences of timely, targeted support: all areas in which Whole Family Support has its most cost-effective impacts. Developing consensus on measures of success, and a stronger evidence base that captures both quantitative results and the lived experiences of families, will enable preventative interventions to be maintained and scaled.
Funding and policy considerations
Funding for Whole Family Support has not consistently reached the third sector. The repeated loss of staff in the sector to short-term contracts is particularly harmful to relationships with families. Multi-year funding, more collaborative commissioning approaches, and dedicated capacity within TSIs and third sector organisations could all improve the coordination and delivery of Whole Family Support.
Concluding thoughts
The evidence gathered here suggest that Whole Family Support needs:
- Shared principles rather than rigid models
- Strong leadership and system-wide collaboration
- Recognition of the third sector as an equal partner
- Better ways of measuring impact
- Long-term, co-ordinated investment
Children in Scotland will build on this to develop our vision for Whole Family Support. This vision will form the basis for a mapping resource which identifies examples of good Whole Family Support, key features, challenges to delivery and to expansion, and effective responses to these challenges. This will inform our ongoing collaboration with the Scottish Government, and with our networks across the sector, to develop a programme of relational, local Whole Family Support for the babies, children, young people, and families across communities in Scotland.
