Advice to the program CaixaProinfancia; change towards a socio-educational action model’s assesment

The CaixaProinfancia program starts in 2007 in response to child poverty, from a model of public-private collaboration, through a multi-dimensional socio-educational action. It takes place in the most populated metropolitan areas of 9 autonomous communities, with an annual average of 35,000 families and 55,000 children given the collaboration of 351 entities of the third sector. A complex advice process was launched in 2010 involving a network of 12 Spanish universities to redirect the programme, framed in a more welfare paradigm, towards a model based on the abilities and the empowerment of participants and with territory as unavoidable reference. The goal of this research is to assess the incidence of the advice on the management for the launched change. For this reason, two additional evaluative research have been developed: a) a descriptive statistical analysis of evolution on the impact of the program on children, families and territories, based on the gathered information by the management of the programme; b) a qualitative evaluation of the impact perception by interest groups, based on information gathered through focus groups and interviews. Results show a progressive turn of a first fragmented and timely attention to a more comprehensive and continuous care intensifying the social support. There are evidence of evolution in social institutions processes of work and collaboration. Although regarding the effectiveness of the program to remove the participants of poverty its positive impact can not be confirmed, improvements in the development of opportunities and resilience factors in the participants are recognized. They are mainly explained by the quality of the performed custom and systematic accompaniment. The difficulties hindering the process are: a) of regulatory or administrative type b) of scarce resources of the entities and administrations to develop a quality socio-educational work, and c) resistance to the professional and political culture change by the involved agents.