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About the Improvement Service

The Improvement Service (IS) is the national improvement organisation for local government in Scotland.

Our purpose is to help councils and their partners to improve the health, quality of life and opportunities of all people in Scotland through community leadership, strong local governance and the delivery of high quality, efficient local services.

Download a copy of the

IS Business Plan 17/18

Download a copy of the

Strategic Framework

Support for Councils

Through a series of principles, the IS works to promote improvement in local government and among its partners to support them improve outcomes and reduce the outcome gaps within populations and within areas.

Support for Community Planning Partnerships

The IS delivers a range of products and services that support CPPs to build their capacity to deliver the public service reform agenda.

Support for Elected Members

The IS has a non-partisan role to support all elected members in Scotland.

Data and Analysis

Viewstat

Welfare Reform Dashboard

Digital Public Services

Tellmescotland

Knowledge Management and Collaboration

Knowledge Hub

Innovation Exchange

Learning and Development

Performance Measurement and Indicators

Consultancy and Facilitation

Change Management

Learning and Skills

Performance Management and

Improvement

Research

Research Programme

Latest Publication

A review of the impact of 2016-17 local authority budget cuts on the provision of money advice services which are funded and/or delivered by local authorities.

Research

We produce a small number of independent research pieces or publications each year, which are listed below. This is in addition to our programme and project-specific publications which can be found on the relevant pages within our Products and Services sections.

Latest Publications

Instrumental Music Services: Results from the IMS Survey May-July 2016

Place-based Approaches to Joint Planning, Resourcing and Delivery: an overview of current practice in Scotland

News

As well as news from the Improvement Service other news relevant to local government improvement in Scotland. is also published. The Improvement Service welcomes contributions from Scottish local authorities and partner organisations. If you have a story you would like to share, contact us.

Newsletters

The Improvement Services produces a series of newsletters on a range of subjects, including myaccount, elected members, tellmescotland as well as the main IS newsletter. Subscribe on this page.

Subscribe to the Improvement Service

See past issues of the IS newsletter

Events

Find out about all the events and activities organised by the Improvement Service or of interest to Scottish local authorities here. If you would like to add an event to this calendar, please contact info@improvementservice.org.uk

You can quickly browse events from the calendar opposite, or go to the events page for full details of all events.

Local Government Benchmarking Framework - information about how Scottish councils perform

The Local Government Benchmarking Framework (LGBF) brings together a wide range of information about how all Scottish councils perform in delivering services to local communities.

Benchmarking is an improvement process that helps organisations understand how they perform in comparison to other, similar organisations. In order to work well it needs to be a systematic and rigorous process designed to help organisations learn together. As such, all Scottish local authorities have worked together to report standard information on the services they provide which can be compared across councils and year-on-year. This information takes the form of specific ‘indicators’ that measure aspects of performance, for example, how much a service costs per user or how satisfied local people are with a service. The indicators cover seven service areas which together account for over 60% of local government spending. These service areas are: children, corporate, adult social care, culture and leisure, environmental, housing and economic development.

The purposes of the Local Government Benchmarking Framework are:

to help councils and their services better understand why they achieve their current performance levels
to build our understanding of where council performance varies
to build our understanding of why council performance varies
to help identify and share good practice across councils

The current Framework contains data from 2010-2015. Details outlining trends across Scotland and the factors affecting those trends are available from the link below.

Go to the Local Government Benchmarking Framework