Catch up with the latest news from the Protecting People team at the Improvement Service.
Violence against women and girls (VAWG)
Violence against women and girls needs assessment tool
We are supporting the Scottish Government and COSLA to develop and test a needs assessment tool that can be used to develop a robust picture of the specific needs of women, children and young people experiencing VAWG in different local authority areas across Scotland. A range of engagement activities took place with local and national stakeholders between April and June 2025 to co-design the aims and content of the needs assessment tool. The draft tool will be tested in a small number of local authority areas between September 2025 and March 2026.
Violence against women and girls and substance use
We have coordinated a series of engagement activities over summer 2025 exploring the prevalence of, and relationship between, VAWG and substance use. The project aims to support Scotland’s Equally Safe Strategy and the Equally Safe Delivery Plan by exploring how collaborative, inter-agency working between VAWG partnerships and alcohol and drugs partnerships, alongside other partners, can ensure that an integrated approach to service planning, design and delivery is adopted to mitigate the risk of harm to women, children and young people. A learning report will be published in autumn 2025.
Adopting a public protection approach to tackling violence against women and girls
In partnership with the Scottish Government, COSLA and Public Health Scotland, we have published the learning report from a national event exploring opportunities to strengthen links across public protection to better support outcomes for women, children and young people who have experienced, or are at risk of experiencing, VAWG. Around 100 people with a role to play in supporting a public protection approach to improve outcomes for victims and survivors of VAWG attended the event. These included national and local leads with responsibilities for child protection, adult support and protection, alcohol and drugs, VAWG, suicide prevention and MAPPA. The learning report aims to support conversations at a local and national level on how to collectively design and implement a plan for strengthening links between VAWG and other areas of public protection.
Trauma-informed approaches
National Trauma Leads Network
As part of our support offer to local areas, we have facilitated regular online peer support meetings to bring together local trauma leads from across Scotland to share learning and practice. To date, this group has operated as an informal network. Throughout spring and summer 2025 we have been working with local areas and national partners to formalise this into a National Trauma Leads Network and to strengthen the collective voice of local trauma lead officers in discussions, planning, consultations and engagement with relevant national partners and networks.
National Trauma Transformation Programme (NTTP) survey and learning report
Building on the National Learning Report from 2024, highlighting the breadth of work happening across local areas to embed a trauma-informed and responsive approach, we have been collaborating with local stakeholders and national partners to develop an annual national survey to capture progress, impact and learning around this work. The findings will inform a national learning report capturing the work to embed a trauma-informed and responsive approach across systems, services and workforces across local areas in Scotland.
Collaborative peer learning workshops
In collaboration with Resilience Learning Partnership (RLP) and the Scottish Government, we co-host collaborative peer learning workshops for trauma champions and lead officers, and professionals working in organisations with a national remit who are leading on work in relation to the trauma agenda. Workshops take place online every eight weeks and are an online space for active learning, reflection and collaboration among local and national colleagues. Each workshop is focused around one or more of the nine themes or drivers from the trauma roadmap and will consider how these apply to local areas and national organisations’ approaches to embed a trauma informed and responsive approach. Speaker videos from previous workshops are published on the NTTP website following each session.