Michelle Kennedy Child 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 strategy What 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 Research CPU updates Data ToolPilot info Child Poverty Toolkit Save the Children C4EO Support & Sector Specialist s Take Up Taskforc e 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 Poverty Everybody’s Business