Jane Hutt, Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Trefnydd and Chief Whip
Earlier this year I committed to publish the Child Poverty Strategy Monitoring Framework this autumn. I am pleased to share the Framework with you today and I will be highlighting its publication during my speech to the Child Poverty Conference later this morning.
The Child Poverty Strategy Monitoring Framework is one of three mechanisms through which progress on delivery of the Child Poverty Strategy will be measured and reported once every three years.
- A Monitoring Framework to report on national level data to assess the impact of efforts across government to address child poverty, largely focussed on outcomes for children and young people.
- A policy progress report which will report on evidence of progress across government on delivering against the objectives, priorities and commitments of the Child Poverty Strategy.
- A report of evidence from children, young people and families with lived experience of poverty. This is intended to provide evidence of whether our work on implementing the strategy across government and with external partners is having any positive impact on the people it is intended to serve.
The framework will be used to report on regular and robust population level data on a range of child poverty indicators to provide insight on impact and direction of travel on the outcomes for children and young people. I believe a framework based on a range of measures will support us to more accurately reflect the impact of our approach to this complex set of problems.
The Monitoring Framework has been developed by Knowledge and Analytical Services (KAS) with Professor Rod Hick, Cardiff University, providing independent advice and expert review to inform the final framework. I also wish to thank our Child Poverty Strategy External Reference Group for sharing their reflections and comments during the development of the framework.
The Framework sets out the domains, National Well-being Indicators, and associated measures against which we will report statistical evidence on our progress.
The framework is wide-ranging, focusing primarily on social outcomes relating to child poverty, deprivation and wellbeing.
Professor Rod Hick provided important challenge and expertise as we developed this Monitoring Framework, meeting regularly with the team and commenting on draft versions as they were developed. Professor Hick has provided a formal report including his final recommendations and feedback and this is published alongside the Framework for transparency.
The Wellbeing of Future Generations Act (2015) National Milestones are an important part of measuring progress in our work. In addition to the Monitoring Framework, we will continue to report annually on our progress in achieving the commitments set out in our Programme for Government and we will publish our Wellbeing of Wales report every year. The Wellbeing of Wales report includes an assessment of our progress towards our National Milestones.
The Child Poverty Strategy Monitoring Framework will be updated every 3 years and used to assess the impact of efforts across government to address child poverty, reflecting the impact of our broad approach to supporting children and mitigating the effects which child poverty has on their lives.
Next Steps
Work to populate the framework with the latest data available in 2025 will be undertaken as part of the statutory reporting on progress against the Child Poverty Strategy.