Michelle Kennedy Child Poverty Sector Specialist

1. Michelle KennedyChild Poverty Sector Specialist

2. Creating a whole area child poverty strategy What do we know about what works? Strong and supportive leadership : political and organisationalA 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 principlesA strategy that encompasses all partners within the local area, involves families and is clear and easy to understand

3. Build on existing strong partnership working and leadershipEnsure 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 provisionUse 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?

4. Develop a strategy that is outcome based on local prioritiesEnsure your strategy embeds child poverty targets in mainstream work, such as service planning, training and development plans, commissioning strategiesCo-locate services / outreach where possible I.e children’s centres, schools, job centres, health clinics etcUse common assessment frameworks and / or impact assessmentsTackle in- work poverty : financial inclusion and support including take up of tax credits and benefitsPool and align budgets and resources How do we do it?

5. Clearly agreed , understood and shared terminology and definitionsStrong and supportive political leadership at local levelAn appropriate degree of area- level autonomy to design and deliver strategies to meet local needsA risk-taking ethos to challenge existing practicesOpen channels of communication and trustAccessible and informative dataCommunity action and citizen led participationInvolvement of the full range of services and organisations in the delivery of the strategy Facilitators

6. Lack of joined up priorities and directionConsultation fatigue and tokenistic representationChild poverty agenda becoming isolatedAssuming that projects are the only answerLack of robust and high quality data and analysis to support decision making and resource allocationLack of long – term development time and planning Barriers

7. Agree with partners and clients what the outcomes, targets and performance indicators will be.Use qualitative and quantitative measuresEnsure outcome measures are focussed on children and familiesCreate strong links between assessment, planning and actionDesign monitoring so that it can be used to assess if and how the intervention has workedRevise following monitoring and assessmentWork with partners to plan and improve data collection Assessing and monitoring the strategy

8. What support is there?

9. signposting all support available core offer of support Child Poverty Unit Website Pilot info Data Tool CPU updates Research Online Resources C4EO Support & Sector Specialists Child Poverty Toolkit Coordinated Offer of Support for Local Partners active personalised support Take Up Taskforce Report and Materials Save the Children Child Poverty Community of Practice LGID Beacons And more… Good Practice Examples

10. Child PovertyEverybody’s Business