The Scottish Government has awarded £2m funding through Every Child, Every Chance, its Tackling Child Poverty Delivery Plan 2018-22, to Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland (CNS), an innovative collaboration involving staff from the Robert Owen Centre for Educational Change (ROC) in the School of Education working with colleagues in Policy Scotland, What Works and Glasgow Centre for Population Health at the Social Research Hub at Olympia in the East End of Glasgow.  

The funding over the next four years will allow CNS to expand its current work in Glasgow’s East End and to set up new Children’s Neighbourhoods across Scotland. Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland is an innovative place-based approach, designed to tackle child poverty by supporting the collective impact of services and community empowerment to improve outcomes for all children in a neighbourhood. Professor Chris Chapman, Director of Policy Scotland and Professor of Educational Policy and Practice within the School of Education at the University of Glasgow said:

This commitment by the Scottish Government is testimony to all of the team’s hard work establishing a robust collaboration between the University and GCPH and dedication to building authentic relationships with the community, key stakeholders and service providers. We now have the support that will enable us to build on our early work by embedding and extending this approach across Glasgow and other neighbourhoods throughout Scotland. 

He added:

CNS is not a quick fix. It is a long-term, sustainable way of working designed to tackle intergenerational cycles of inequality by bringing communities and services together in new and exciting ways. This requires building strong and trusting relationships and rethinking roles and responsibilities to better meet the specific needs of children in particular neighbourhoods.“In addition to developing additional Children’s Neighbourhoods in Glasgow we anticipate prototyping the model in different contexts including urban, town and rural settings to establish which elements of the model are transferable across different contexts in Scotland and which relate to specific contexts. In this sense we are developing an evidence-based framework and set of principles that can improve outcomes for children in neighbourhoods across Scotland.

Communities Secretary Angela Constance announced the Scottish Government’s delivery plan to tackle child poverty last week.

More information on Children’s Neighbourhoods can be found at: https://childrensneighbourhoodsscotland.com.