John Swinney was in listening mode. He needs help. He needs advice. Eighteen years after entering office with a high priority given to the ending of child poverty, it’s proving to be tougher than it looked.

The most recent figures suggest a quarter of Scotland’s children were living in poverty in the early years of this decade – 240,000 young lives.

The First Minister was giving a speech in Stirling, setting out his thinking on one of his four priorities. Usually, officials whisk ministers away from such events, claiming there are pressing engagement elsewhere.

But on this occasion, John Swinney stayed to listen to an audience with experience of tackling poverty at the sharp end, telling him of the burnout, insecurity and hand-to-mouth funding.

While it’s no easy task to boost growth, improve public services or solve the climate crisis – his other priorities – the child poverty figures stand out as a rebuke with a moral dimension, acknowledged in the speech.

Legislating a target for reducing child poverty may have looked like commitment to the cause, as it did for reduction of carbon emissions. That’s until there is a reckoning, the policy fails and the government’s own law is broken.

The target was for 18% of children in poverty by last financial year, falling to 10% by the end of the decade – yet the most recent figure was up to 24%.

Exacerbated by a financial crisis, tightly squeezed welfare budgets, a pandemic and surge in the cost of living, the figures for the whole population also look grim – a million Scots in poverty, measured by income below 60% of median income (the amount earned by the person in the middle of the earnings table).

Those in deep poverty, below the 40% mark, have become a more entrenched feature. Having fallen below that poverty line, there is no safety net or floor of guaranteed income beneath it.

It probably has not helped that there has been turmoil and churn in St Andrew’s House, with first ministers coming and going. Yet each of them has kept as a high priority the vision of Scotland without child poverty.

Implicit in John Swinney’s speech is the lesson that this is not a matter of which powers Holyrood has, or of a simple allocation of money in each year’s budget.

It’s proven to be tougher than that, and Mr Swinney was reflecting that the role of government, as well as a source of finance, is to lead and to convene, to enable, help and motivate others to do the non-financial bits of alleviating poverty.

Ministers can point to big policy interventions – a big lift in childcare, partly to help parents earn, and introduction of the Scottish Child Payment to households with low income, at £26.70 per child per week, helping 330,000 young people.

That is acknowledged by anti-poverty campaigners as a game-changer and they say it’s one that other parts of the UK should follow. It’s expensive, at £470m per year, squeezing other budgets at Holyrood, yet those campaigners don’t think it goes far enough.

The other big item that could shift the dial would be an end to the UK government’s two-child cap on benefits, introduced in 2017 to save money and discourage big families by limiting benefits to only two children in a family, with a few exceptions.

The surprise element in last month’s draft budget at Holyrood was the announcement that ministers intend to mitigate that for larger Scottish families.

If there’s help from Whitehall in identifying those who could qualify to receive it, that could be in place from April 2026.

In his Stirling speech, John Swinney said that if it can be introduced earlier than that, it will be.

Yet at an independent estimate of £155m in the first year, that money is not in the 2025-26 budget.

And if Downing Street ends that cap, the First Minister offered another pricey commitment – saying that money would be allocated to other endeavours to end child poverty.

It’s not difficult to find uses for it. While it might look simple to raise benefits above that 60% threshold, poverty is aligned with problems of housing availability and cost, educational opportunity and fair work.

It can also be about the quality of relationships and about mental health.

Jim McCormick, director of the Robertson Trust which hosted the First Minister’s speech in Stirling and a long-time researcher into poverty, points to one perplexing element of modern poverty – that it is to be widely found in families with at least one working adult.

That’s despite the minimum wage, introduced 26 years ago, rising at one of the fastest rates among developed nations. The hourly rate looks much better than it did, but the take-home pay does not, explains McCormick, because too many people cannot get the number of hours of work they need for an income to sustain their household. Or they could, but they’ve got children to look after.

The Westminster government is legislating to reduce work insecurity, and that Bill is facing resistance from employers. The CBI’s president, Rupert Soames said this week that it looks like “an adventure playground” for employment lawyers.

Such legislation could help boost take-home pay alongside the higher minimum wage. Jim McCormick says there is a further need for employers to act as ‘community anchors’, where they have roots, often as long-established family firms, or providing a public service in a hospital or university.

International evidence points to city and regional leadership as important to drawing together the partners needed to move against poverty on all fronts.

For the Scottish government, that could mean giving away some control and credit to local councils, perhaps encouraging diverse approaches towards the same target.

It could also mean a new relationship with the third sector of voluntary groups and charities that deliver some of the best wrap-around services but which struggle from year to year with insecure funding.

However, the Robertson Trust director sounds weary of well-intentioned pilot projects that fail to embed when they are applied more widely.

“They don’t stick,” he says. “We need to stop the cycle of reinvention every three to five years.”

For the rest of us, the public, there was a plea in a report last autumn from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, researching and campaigning on poverty, that social security should not be ‘othered’, but acknowledged as a public service – there for all when it’s needed, and in need of more funding and flexibility to address the way poverty hits families hardest where there are disabilities.

John Swinney, in his Stirling speech, was channelling the inspirational language of ex-US President Bill Clinton when he asserted “there’s nothing wrong with Scotland that can’t be fixed by what is right with Scotland”.

The speech was intended to galvanise others to work together as much as to revisit and revive political promises.

It might also count as a signal that the SNP leader is in the tricky process of reviving and reinventing his party after nearly 18 years in power, showing some humility and acknowledging the complexity of tackling the big policy challenges.