Introduction to the toolkit
This section tries to answer some of the 'why, who, and how' questions for local authorities looking to tackle child poverty, as well as giving some information about the toolkit development process and backers;
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Why should Local Authorities be concerned by child poverty; why this toolkit?
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Who is the toolkit aimed at?
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What tools are available?
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How can the toolkit be used?
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About the toolkit.
The toolkit responds to the following initiatives:
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The Local Government White Paper [1] which set out an ambition for local authorities to develop strategies to tackle child poverty
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Subsequent new set of national performance indicators issued for use in the Local and Multi-Area Agreement process by Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), including a child poverty indicator [2]
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Proposals for a new Comprehensive Area Assessment framework for local authorities with a greater emphasis on effective partnership working to deliver against local priorities [3]
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Government focus on tackling child poverty, shown by publication of Ending Child Poverty: Everybody’s Business [4] with the Budget in March 2008.
With the exception of the publication of Everybody’s Business these initiatives have been focused on local authorities in England. Whilst many of the messages are equally relevant for authorities in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, different data sets, and performance and partnership frameworks means that this toolkit cannot simply be read across to authorities in those countries.
Why should Local Authorities be concerned by child poverty; why this toolkit?
In 1999, the Government made an historic commitment to eradicate child poverty in the UK by 2020, with a milestone to halve it by 2010. This commitment grew from the recognition that the material circumstances into which children are born and in which they develop have not only short term impacts on their health and education but also impact in the longer term on their life chances as adults. Policy makers have also become increasingly concerned that these problems have become entrenched across the generations.
We describe individuals, families and groups to be in poverty
‘…when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or are at least widely encouraged and approved, in the societies in which they belong’[5].
The consequences of this description for service planning centre around three key aspects:
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Resources, this can be money, or it can be access to services that are free at the point of use;
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Participation relates to normal activities, including accessing decent services, not just access to bare necessities;
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Living standards are assessed relatively – in comparison with what would ordinarily be expected by most of society
Local authorities have long been in the frontline of efforts to tackle deprivation and to provide accessible services to members of their communities. However, it has often been the case that initiatives at the local level have focused on the many individual aspects of the problem in isolation of each other, and that a focus on child poverty has not been at the heart of service planning or the targeting of provision. The publication by Government of a specific child poverty indicator for possible inclusion in Local and Multi-Area Agreements, together with proposed changes to the performance framework for local authorities and strategic partnerships, are serving to focus greater attention on the role that local agencies can play in helping to achieve the national ambition of eradicating child poverty.
In effect Government is both:
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Facilitating action through the LAA and MAA processes amongst those local partnerships with a real desire to tackle child poverty, and
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Requiring all local authorities to take appropriate steps by incorporating action on child poverty within the new Comprehensive Area Assessment framework.
Other proposed measures also serve to reinforce this direction of travel, including plans to forge links between Children’s Services and activities to reduce worklessness. These include the new duty, from April 2008, for local authorities to ensure that there is sufficient child care available to enable parents to work, or to undertake education and training that can lead to employment.
The cumulative impact is a renewed attention on child poverty at the local level. As a consequence, local authorities are now considering how best to reflect this within:
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Partnership structures and governance arrangements – ensuring that overarching scrutiny takes place of the wide range of initiatives that have an impact on child poverty
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Data gathering and monitoring processes to establish accurate baseline information and to enable reports on ongoing progress
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Commissioning processes and service delivery arrangements, ensuring that links are made between relevant service areas at the point of delivery in local communities
It would be wrong to think of this as a purely ‘top down’ development. Many local councilors, public service managers and workers, and local voluntary and community sector services have demonstrated long standing concerns about levels of child poverty in their areas, and have made real progress driving improvements to services focused on the needs of deprived communities. The new framework from Government allows this process to continue and gives added impetus to the best practice already taking place on the ground. The result is a rising tide of interest and concern about child poverty in local areas with an increasing demand for tools that can improve understanding of the problem and help to develop services that can improve the life chances for children in their areas. We hope this toolkit can assist in this process.
Who is the toolkit aimed at?
This toolkit is primarily aimed at members of local strategic partnerships, and particularly those that have chosen to include the new Child Poverty indicator (N116) within their Local or Multi-Area Agreement to target child poverty in their areas.
However, all local strategic partnerships will be assessed on the basis of the new Comprehensive Area Assessment from April 2009 onwards. This compels them to consider the quality of life available to all residents in their communities, including vulnerable groups. The Audit Commission have made it clear that:
‘The area risk assessment will not be restricted to Local Area Agreement priorities, and is likely to reflect the inspectorates’ assessment of the quality of engagement with local communities and the risks to people in vulnerable circumstances in the area.’ [6]
Although many local strategic partnerships have been dealing with the consequences of child poverty in their areas, the degree to which they have developed structures and delivery arrangements to make the links between child poverty, service planning, commissioning, and delivery differs significantly between them. Some local partnerships have embedded their anti-poverty work across the existing blocks of the Local Area Agreement and are actively seeking to reduce and prevent child poverty; others will not have been thinking about policy in this way.
This toolkit tries, in a complex area, to provide accessible material to help local strategic partnerships improve their policy whatever their starting point. We have tried not to assume lots of knowledge about the concepts, policies, and national discourse on child poverty, but CPAG and Inclusion are learning in a new area – if there are tools you would like to see developed further; things which are not clear; or best practice you can share, please let us know.
What tools are available?
This toolkit is intentionally a work in progress, CPAG and Inclusion hope to develop it over time to better meet the needs of local strategic partnerships. The toolkit sets out to strengthen the ability of local partners to understand child poverty in their areas and to act to prevent and reduce it. The toolkit contains a range of resources:
Policy briefs
These are intended as guide to debates around child poverty and its impacts. They should help to contextualise local discussion. We have included working briefs on:
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The national target to eradicate child poverty and how child poverty is measured;
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Groups of children at greatest risk of being poor;
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Employment and child poverty;
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Health and child poverty;
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Housing and child poverty;
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Education and child poverty.
Data tools
These tools are intended to help understand your local context, to help engage partners and to understand how policy should be developed. We have included:
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A short power point presentation generated specifically for your area with context, high level up-to-date indicators, and national and regional comparators; and
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A longer, data rich, presentation generated for your area with assistance on how to interpret trends;
Good practice guides
There are good practice examples from local partnerships that are currently thinking about child poverty and developing policies and services to reduce it.
Strategy development tools
This section tries to provide the essentials about how to develop an appropriate strategy. This section contains recommendations about the essential elements of a strategy; maximizing the impact of the Local Area or Multi-Area agreement; and partnership working. This section also contains a key tool with principles for child poverty proofing policy and services.
How can the toolkit be used?
The first stage within the local strategic partnership will be to work who should lead on this policy area (for instance Regeneration, Economic Development, Children's Services, Health, and Housing all have an active interest). The strategy tools [hyper link] may help with this and with how to construct an effective process to design, implement and review anti-poverty work.
The analysis elements of the toolkit provide help for partners to understand the local child poverty story and aim to help communicate this story across the partnership in order to stimulate debate about possible solutions.
At the policy development and scrutiny stages, we suggest effective use of the child poverty proofing principles contained within the toolkit. These should help partners to understand the impact of proposals on child poverty and help them to develop effective design and delivery. These principles can be used to review current as well as future policy.
The toolkit presents options for indicators to measure progress. It is obviously important to set a direction of progress and to measure this. Equally it is important to pick the right indicators and understand what they show and what they omit. The data tools should help with this monitoring process.
About the toolkit
The toolkit has been compiled by Inclusion and the Child Poverty Action Group. Both organizations have a long held interest and experience in tackling poverty and improving life chances. We are grateful to our sponsors (listed below) for funding the toolkit, but Inclusion and CPAG are responsible for content. We have tried to accurately represent government policies but the views are our own, not those of government departments.
The toolkit sponsors are Islington Council, the Knowsley Partnership, the Department for Work and Pensions, Department for Children, Schools and Families, the Child Poverty Unit, Department for Communities, and Local Government, the London Child Poverty Commission, the Improvement and Development Agency (I&DEA) and London Councils.
The toolkit was developed after September 2007 workshops in Newcastle, Knowsley, London and Birmingham. Workshop participants included local authority workers from children's services, social services, regeneration, social inclusion and economic development, Job Centre Plus, local learning and skills councils, primary care trusts, private and voluntary sector service providers, local employers, government offices and central government departments. In particularly we have worked closely with Islington council and Knowsley partnership. We are grateful for the support and input in developing the toolkit.
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