The Evaluation of the Equality Evidence Strategy 2023-2025

6. Collaboration Sessions with External Stakeholders

Scottish Government has become aware of stakeholders critic of progress on a range of equality issues, including increasing the availability of disaggregated and intersectional data. To reassure external stakeholders that we are progressing work in the equality data space and begin making improvements to our communication with external organisations, we created four online collaboration sessions.

The objectives of these sessions were to:

• Promote and extend the reach of the work of EDIP and the EES;
• Reassure organisations that we are progressing with a range of activities within the equality evidence space as part of the Equality Evidence Strategy and across Scottish Government more generally;
• Support relationships with external organisations who are interested in improving and using equality evidence;
• learn from external stakeholders to understand their priorities around improving and using equality evidence to ensure that the new Strategy aligns (where possible) to these priorities.

Overall, 41 individuals from a range of 3^rd sector organisations, academia, and public services/authorities attended the Collaboration Sessions. A short poll revealed that the majority of stakeholders had “no” to “basic” understanding of the work of the Strategy, EDIP and wider equalities work across Scottish Government. The majority of attendees were also from organisations or individuals that had not previously contributed to the current or previous Equality Evidence Strategies.

Stakeholders were generally pleased with the information provided on the work of the Equality Evidence Strategy and other equality evidence work happening across Scottish Government. Many of them acknowledged that it contained work or tools that they had not heard of before and that they would share these with others.

Attendees agreed with the four areas identified by the EDIP Board as potential focuses for the next Strategy in the presentation:

• increasing use of qualitative & lived experience evidence
• mainstreaming intersectionality across SG equality consideration and use of equality data in policymaking
• increasing confidence and capabilities (for SG and public authorities, academic, and 3^rd sector)
• and identifying and prioritising evidence gaps.

Further detailed discussion highlighted key themes across the sessions which have been summarised as:

• The need to strengthen data infrastructure by
• increasing the use of intersectional data, qualitative evidence and lived experience evidence.
• creating more granular equality and local data to identify nuance
• making better use of existing data, administrative data, and analytical/evidence tools.
• improving data integrity of equality measure/outcomes.
• Strengthening relationships and proactive collaboration between data users and organisations. Benefits included
• understanding needs across SG and 3^rd sector, academic and public authorities/services.
• disseminating guidance and tools to collect, analyse and access equality and intersectional evidence to increase confidence and capabilities across Scottish Government and external organisations. Examples included, sharing Scottish Government guidance and best practice examples as well as promoting the use of tools like the Equality Evidence Finder. Stakeholders saw this as an opportunity to increase alignment, harmonisation, and Scottish Government’s confidence in engaging with external data/evidence.
• improved transparency from Scottish Government about the reasons for collecting data and what the intended purpose is (as stakeholders believed this is not always clear and could discourage engagement in research) so that external organisations can better support or advise.
• Improving the function of the next Strategy by
• seeing the impact and link of improving equality data in policymaking and decision making.
• being more agile and flexible in monitoring equality evidence improvement activities (although examples of how to do this were not discussed).
• leveraging the EDIP Board and the Equality Analysis team’s position to influence the equality evidence space.
• focusing on specific equality characteristics and topic area focuses for actions in the next strategy.

These sessions are a key step in building and supporting future relationships with external organisations who are interested in improving and using equality evidence. These sessions also allowed us to understand the attending external stakeholders priorities around improving and using equality evidence, providing us early insights to take forward to development of the new Strategy. Further collaboration and engagement sessions will be delivered as part of ongoing development work for the new Strategy.