We’re planning a busy year at What Works Scotland.

2018 is our last year so we’ll be focused on drawing together the findings from the different strands of our work and spreading the word about what’s been learnt about collaborative public service reform.

We will synthesise the findings from working on in-depth collaborative action research work with community planning partnerships in four case sites.

And we’ll be combining this work with findings from our other workstreams to offer a detailed conceptual and practical analysis of public service reform. Our aim is to facilitate practical and strategic understanding of this for multiple partners involved in public services.

We’re already using our emerging ideas to support the implementation of collaborative PSR across Scotland – for complex dimensions such as leadership, governance, scrutiny, partnership, community engagement and prevention. And we’re using these to create evidence-based solutions, toolkits and frameworks.

Other projects have been set up using the What Works Scotland blueprint, including the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence and Children’s Neighbourhoods Scotland, and we’ve worked with Wales and Northern Ireland to advise on setting up similar What Works initiatives.

The £1 million transnational European project Smart Urban Intermediaries, which includes the University of Edinburgh, is also built on some of the learning from What Works Scotland.
Graphic that shows: What Works Scotland in numbers: more than 40 events, attended by more than 1,900 delegates; 2,600+ Twitter followers; 1,000+ people subscribe to the newsletter; 46,000+ visits to the website; £480,000 in additional grants invested by partners in What Works Scotland initiatives; 8 PhD studentships.

This year What Works Scotland will significantly extend our knowledge exchange work and increase our engagement and impact with those responsible for designing, delivering and using public services.

Our plans include:

  • Events and seminars, including webinars, and a major public service reform conference towards the end of the year
  • Policy briefings on key areas for public service reform
  • Evidence reviews, case studies and toolkits focused on key issues such as partnership/collaborative working; outcomes and evaluation; building community capacity; prevention and leadership; and challenging inequalities.
  • Academic papers to build research capacity for engaged scholarship

We’re looking forward to an exciting and productive year!

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