Prioritise child poverty: a data and systems approach

In 2019 Public Health Scotland and Inverclyde Council began a child poverty focused Public Health Needs Assessment pilot project.

This project aimed to support better use of data to shape local priorities around child poverty.

We worked together to build up a better picture of what the local child poverty system looked like in Inverclyde, what data was being captured and how it could be used to best support local families.

The work helped local partners think about how they might better collaborate, and apply a child poverty lens to local service provision, to prevent and reduce child poverty. The approach brought together participants from a wide range of local services in Inverclyde with a role to play in the lives of low income families.

The process focused on:

• mapping local services that low income families might use
• thinking about what their journey might be through and between those services
• what families might need from local services
• the data those services collect about families

As part of this process, we identified local and national data sources to get a clearer picture of child poverty, and where the gaps in that data might be.

From this work, we developed a Child Poverty Data Source that tells us more about the local and national data sources that can be used to inform local understanding about child poverty.

Resources to support the approach

We have produced resources about our work in Inverclyde. The resources can be used by local authorities, or any other interested party, to replicate or adapt the approach applied in Inverclyde.

The resources include:

• Animation: the short animation provides an overview of our approach in Inverclyde, what we did in our workshops and who we worked with
• Child Poverty Data Source: an excel spreadsheet that sets out local and national data sources, themed by the driver of child poverty, to help build a good picture of local child poverty
• Overview document: this explains more about the Child Poverty Data Source and the processes that took place to generate this resource
• Workshop outlines: these provide an overview of the workshops delivered in Inverclyde as part of the public health needs assessment process
• ‘Pen Portraits’: developed for the workshops these are short descriptions of the lives of two low income, fictional, families
• Process map examples from Inverclyde workshop: this provides example process maps, that show how a family might be helped by services and when, and that could be used in workshops
• Public Health Needs Assessment approach in Inverclyde: this provides an overview of the needs assessment process and the themes we focused on in Inverclyde
• Slides to support a public health needs assessment: these provide information about our assessment approach and could be used to support your own assessment
• Child Poverty in Scotland slides: general slides about child poverty that could be used to support workshops
• Lived Experience note: we didn’t engage with people with lived experience of poverty in Inverclyde but this note provides some information on how you might do this

View the resources

Further information

You can contact phs.evaluationteam@phs.scot for further information on this work.