New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy: 2024

Outcomes

New Scots partners have established six overarching outcomes, which this Strategy will work to achieve.

1. New Scots live in safe, welcoming, inclusive communities, where everyone’s dignity is respected and everyone is able to build diverse relationships and healthy intercultural bonds.

2. New Scots are able to access well-coordinated services, which recognise and meet their rights and needs.

3. New Scots understand their rights, responsibilities and entitlements in Scotland and are able to exercise these to pursue full and independent lives. New Scots can pursue their ambitions through education, employment, culture and leisure activities in diverse communities.

4. Communities in Scotland understand integration interculturally and respect the diversity and strengths that New Scots bring.

5. Policy, strategic planning, and legislation, that have an impact on New Scots, are shaped through their participation and informed by their rights, needs and aspirations.

6. The principles of the New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy guide all future responses to crises that bring forced migrants to Scotland and seek to ensure all such migrants will be treated equitably.

The outcomes that the Strategy seeks to deliver are grounded in an approach that places refugees and people seeking asylum at the heart of the communities in which they reside. As such, it recognises that, for approaches to integration to succeed, this must be done in and with local communities, as well as with New Scots.

The New Scots outcomes will be progressed through actions which will be set out in the Delivery Plan, alongside measures to show progress. All of these will be developed together with partners, stakeholders and those with lived experience.