Skip to content

Stronger, Safer Workforces

Everyone in Scotland has a right to safety. You can protect and prepare your staff, and improve your services to help those affected by violence and abuse in your workforce and in your community.

To transform the lives of women and girls – with a focus on all the intersections within their identities – there is a need for a gender lens to be applied consistently across practice at all levels of the workforce. This will ensure our practitioners, policies, services and systems reflect an understanding of gender at every step of design, development, delivery and implementation.

To achieve this, we must build the capacity of our workers – workforce knowledge, skills and practice must have a gendered analysis of VAWG to support a shared understanding of the causal links between gender inequality and violence against women and girls.

The Equally Safe in Practice Framework aims to respond to these issues by:

  • Establishing core messaging on gender and VAWG,
  • Outlining a knowledge and skills matrix for workers across all levels, and
  • Developing approaches to embed the knowledge and learning into everyday practice, for a long-lasting organisational and cultural change.

How can we support you?

We have developed a national workforce development framework. The framework provides a clear, structured matrix of essential knowledge and practice skills tailored to different roles within the workforce. This matrix defines what workers need to know and do, according to their levels of responsibility, to effectively recognise and respond to VAWG.

The framework aims to: 

  • Establish consistent core messaging on gender, VAWG and intersectionality   
  • Offer a competency framework that outline what workers need to know and do    
  • Encourage a ‘whole organisation’ approach to learning and development that engages staff in every part of the system 
  • Support lasting change and a transformation in everyday practice by providing tools for reflective practice and implementation of learning 

What does the framework offer our organisation?

By utilising and implementing the ESiP Knowledge & Skills Framework in your workplace, your organisation will be supported to: 

  • Raise awareness of attitudes and behaviours that perpetuate inequality and violence 
  • Adopt an understanding of gender inequality as the root cause of Violence Against Women and Girls – ending VAWG means addressing inequality 
  • Equip workforces to make meaningful changes to daily practice, regardless of role or level 
  • Drive lasting change in attitudes, behaviours, and practices byenhancing workplace culture and focusing on staff competence

    Embedding knowledge into practice

    Research and learning from the ESiP pilot phase have underlined for us that building capacity in our workforces means seeing learning as not just one-off training but a process of obtaining, improving and retaining skills and knowledge. A key part of that learning process is through peer discussion, reflective practice and the opportunity to consider, query or unpick assumptions and ideas.

    Reflective practice should be focused on working definitions and meanings of gender, personal values and attitudes, building understanding of the gendered analysis of VAWG, recognising practical relevance to the requirements of the job, and necessary skills and confidence to apply in practice.

    For more information on how the modules can be used, and approaches how to embed the knowledge to make a long-lasting impact please see the Equally Safe in Practice Module Toolkit.