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.
We do this by providing a range of products and providing advisory services including consultation and facilitation, learning and skills, performance management and improvement, and research. You can find out more about all our products and services by visiting the Products and Services sections of this site.
In November 2015, we published our strategic framework and development priorities for the next five years. The framework gives our reading of the challenges local government and local services will face over the five-year period and sets out the support that the IS and other partners want to provide to help councils and Community Planning Partnerships deal with them.
From 2015-2020, our priorities are to:
Our work is focused in seven key areas to support these priorities:
The Strategic Framework provides the foundations on which our annual Business Plan, programme plans and resource plans are developed. Our annual plans are continually evolving to ensure we are best placed to respond to current and emerging pressures and to ensure that resources are targeted in the areas that matter most to councils and partners.
The IS carries out an annual stakeholder survey to assess and report the extent to which councils and partnerships find our support valuable.
The survey report presents the overall results of our latest survey. It explains our approach to continuous improvement and provides an overview of key improvement activity and actions.
Each team has its own approach to improvement and improvement action plan, therefore individual stakeholder groups will be updated further over the coming months.
Our detailed spending plans are fully integrated and aligned to our business plan for the coming year. In 2017/18 we received £1.656m Revenue Support Grant to fund our core programmes and £4.6m to deliver the myaccount programme and services. We also secured a number of specific grants.
We also generate additional funding and resourcing.
Our 2017-18 financial statements are now available: Download the 2017-18 statutory financial statements
The Improvement Service is a partnership between the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE). It is a company limited by guarantee. The Improvement Service is governed by a Board of Directors which meets quarterly and this is chaired by Councillor Alison Evison, President of COSLA. Current board members are:
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.
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.
The IS delivers a range of products and services that support CPPs to build their capacity to deliver the public service reform agenda.
The IS has a non-partisan role to support all elected members in Scotland.
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.
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.
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.