Scotland's equality evidence strategy 2017-2021

10.Future Collaboration

As we have made clear throughout this report, the Scottish Government will aim to work collaboratively with its partners to improve Scotland's equality evidence base. There are many different ways to do this, and we will deploy a range of methods of communication to share information, ideas and good practice.

We have previously worked closely with partner organisations to bring together equality policy makers and analysts, to discuss equality evidence gaps, priorities and future analytical plans. These events helped to co-ordinate Scotland's analytical projects on equality and widen their use, as well as helping to avoid any duplication of work. They were well received, and the Scottish Government will consider organising future roundtables to discuss particular items such as equality analysis of a large data source (e.g. the SSCQ), developments on a particular equality characteristic, or analysis related to policy theme.

We will seek to work more closely with academics to utilise their expertise on particular protected characteristics and bespoke areas of policy. And we will also aim to involve those working locally to provide an opportunity for sharing what works and good practice, particularly ideas that could be disseminated to other local areas. The feasibility and value of an overarching 'equality forum', which could potentially bring together a research network on equality across the characteristics, will be considered. However, we recognise the breadth of the subject of 'equality', and it may be that focussed or themed networks are more practicable.

We will seek to improve and develop the Equality Evidence Finder web resource and will continue to share analytical information on equality electronically with stakeholders - there are around 800 users signed up to receiving notification of new reports and developments on equality analysis through the ScotStat ^[95] forum. We will also look to share information and improve social media presence - currently key analytical work is highlighted on the Twitter channel @EqualityPoverty ^[96]

Scottish Government will use a range of mediums to communicate and collaborate in order to see that analysis carried out across the public sector, third sector and academia is utilised to its full to fill evidence gaps and strengthen Scotland's equality evidence base.