An anti-poverty partnership project in West Lothian has proven to be a winner after it scooped a research award.
A joint submission from West Lothian Council’s Anti-Poverty Service and The Improvement Service picked up a prize at the LARIA (Local Area Research + Intelligence Association) Research Impact Awards.
The project won the award for ‘Best use of data to address unmet need’.
The Improvement Service and West Lothian Council have worked together to develop an approach to identifying unmet need using a combination of publicly available and council held data take up of Education Benefits.
By bringing together these datasets, analytical insights, and local knowledge, a Child Poverty Index model was created to show the places where support entitlement is not reaching those in need. This is incredibly powerful information available at granular level, as it goes beyond single datasets that tend to only show current uptake.
The judges were impressed by the simplicity of the approach, use of the council’s own data, and the impact that it has already had locally.
The LARIA Research Impact Awards are the only awards specifically designed to showcase the work of those researching local areas and recognise the impact of research at a local level and showcase the very best work of our members.
Leader of West Lothian Council, Lawrence Fitzpatrick said: “This is an impressive project demonstrating the potential of partnership working in the public sector to create tangible results that support local communities. It is pleasing to see this work has been recognised and I congratulate the council’s Anti-Poverty Service and the Improvement Service.
“The insights gained from this project will allow services to better target resources directly to areas that are in most need, addressing a key priority in trying to alleviate poverty at a local level.”
West Lothian Council’s Anti-Poverty Manager Nahid Hanif said: “Working in partnership with the Improvement Service, we now have a better understanding of how to most appropriately analyse the data at our disposal to provide the most appropriate support for our customers.
“The Child Poverty Index model allows identification of unmet need in communities with high levels of poverty but low levels of benefit uptake, this model will help identify households with children in poverty, particularly those with unmet need not identified in other datasets.
“This has given us a strong place to start and as we add more data sets we will be able to understand the scale and local need that other data sets are not able to tell us.”
Nick Cassidy, Research Manager at the Improvement Service, added: “This project allowed us to use the research skills and experience of the Improvement Service, together with local expertise from West Lothian Council, to deliver simple, low-cost, actionable insights that will deliver support to those in need within West Lothian.
“It is a great honour to have this work recognised at the LARIA Research Impact Awards and we hope that this model will go on to help many more families and young people across West Lothian and the rest of Scotland.”
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