Report questions targeting services

The rationale for selecting areas to provide Children’s Fund services was “not always clear and logical”, a new report claims.

The study, part of the National Evaluation of the Children’s Fund and commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills, said little prior consideration was given to the suitability of areas for Children’s Fund services before they were set up.

It also found that services needed to use local cultural and professional knowledge to ensure they had positive benefits and did not risk labelling different groups as “problem communities”.

Another evaluation study, which looked at the work of two fund areas with a high number of refugee and asylum-seeking children, found that the government’s dispersal policy had caused families to be housed in neighbourhoods with small ethnic minority populations and a lack of services.