Frequently Asked Questions
Who is The Level for?
The Level is a national delivery protocol to prevent Severe and Multiple Disadvantage (SMD). The core disadvantages of SMD are defined as homelessness, substance use and offending. These often overlap with experiences including mental ill-health and domestic abuse and the persistent threat of poverty and violence.
The Level supports people facing SMD by providing tools for public services and organisations to act together. This includes services across housing, health, social care and justice, as well as third sector and community organisations supporting people at the hard edges.
Why is The Level needed?
While Scotland has a range of measures to tackle multiple disadvantage, there has been no consistent and system-wide delivery framework to join up services and shift towards prevention at scale. We already have successful approaches such as Housing First, the MAT standards or the SHORE standards which show what can be achieved when we change the way we work.
But people do not live their lives separated into these neat categories. The Level aims to act as the glue between these approaches, offering a common framework for practitioners, commissioners and policy makers and providing a joined-up approach to those whose needs reach across more than one service.
Is The Level a homelessness initiative?
No. While the homelessness sector initiated the development of The Level, its design and development has been a cross-sector collaboration across health, social care, housing and justice.
People experiencing severe and multiple disadvantage can encounter these services at the same time, so The Level is designed to work across traditional public service boundaries to address severe and multiple disadvantage through joined-up, practical action.
It also extends beyond statutory public services to include community organisations, youth work, peer support, employability projects, advice services and faith and cultural organisations, all of which can often reach people earlier than statutory services. The Level depends on formal systems connecting with and valuing the role these organisations play.
What does The Level ask people to do differently?
The Level is both a culture and a practice change method aimed at three sets of key changemakers – frontline workers in support and advice roles and their service leads (practitioners and providers), colleagues who design, fund and procure services (funders and commissioners), and policymakers who shape legislation and strategy.
Resting on four foundations, a set of principles and Level Checks assists each group of changemakers to identify what they can do differently in their role to implement the No Wrong Door approach.
For a practitioner this might mean embedding the Level Checks into everyday discussions to build a whole person picture of someone’s life, rather than only looking at the issue that brought someone through the door. For a commissioner this could mean structuring funding and grants to prioritise prevention and build the relationships needed to provide joined-up support rather than focusing only on areas of activity, and for policymakers this could mean identifying the barriers to joined up support that frontline services cannot resolve alone and working to remove these.
Together, this can help create a feedback loop between practice, resources and policy – so frontline workers are supported to work differently, services are designed and funded to support them doing so, and barriers identified through everyday practice can be broken down to enable wider system change.
What do you mean by the four foundations and level checks?
The Four Foundations set the national floor, or minimum standard, for how systems and services should work for people experiencing severe and multiple disadvantage. These are centred around the principles of a Whole Person approach, Human Connection, Early Help and Brave Action. The Level protocol provides more information on what these mean in turn.
The Level Checks provide a useful reference point to inspire each changemaker to turn these principles into action in their own role. Used together this approach helps public service workers identify overlapping issues and coordinate support before problems pile up, while reducing the need for people to repeat their story to different public services and helping to connect people with both formal services and community support.
Who owns The Level?
The Level rests on the idea of shared ownership, as it is designed as a joint approach across our public services and their partners. Policymakers at national and local level have a role in creating the conditions for change; local leaders have responsibility for making it happen across places and services; organisations must enable their staff to work differently; and frontline practitioners need the authority and flexibility to act around the needs of the person.
Is this just another framework?
No. The Level is not a new initiative competing for resources, nor is it simply repeating past calls for better partnership working. It is a practical delivery mechanism to take existing theory and commitments on public service reform, No Wrong Door, prevention and integration and turn these into practical delivery – moving from a fragmented, crisis-driven system to a whole system approach that puts the whole person first and prevents problems before they grow or pile up.
It sets a national floor, gives every part of the system the shared tools to meet it, and uses continuous feedback loops to ensure the system stops adding harm and starts raising the floor for everyone.
Who will the lead professional be?
This is a key principle in The Level. There is no single organisation that will automatically provide the Lead Professional. While it will deliver coordination and continuity, it is not automatically a statutory role, and public bodies retain accountability for their statutory duties.
The Lead Professional in any given case will depend on who is the person best placed to support the individual, taking account of their circumstances and crucially, who they trust.
For people at the hard edges, the right Lead Professional is often the person already closest to them – the one they trust, who knows their story and who can stay with them across systems. That may be a social worker. It may equally be a third sector worker, advocacy worker, peer practitioner or community-link worker. The test is not job title or sector. It is relationship, continuity and the ability to coordinate to prevent crisis deepening.
Scotland already has a foundation for this through the GIRFEC Lead Professional Framework and the Whole Family Approach. The Level calls for that proven model to be extended, inclusively, as a national standard for adults facing severe and multiple disadvantage. Funders and commissioners should centre the Lead Professional in their planning and design.
How will we know if The Level is working?
The Level contains an Outcomes Framework which will help track whether the protocol is delivering improvement in practice. It translates The Level into practical measures of change for people facing severe and multiple disadvantage.
It is a flexible tool, not a rigid national checklist. Local partnerships can select relevant indicators, add place-based priorities and build it into existing planning and reporting cycles. Nationally, it offers key indicators for tracking impact and aligning overlapping strategies around a small number of shared outcomes for people facing SMD.