As we outlined in the annual report, we have been taking forward a range of things. The tomorrow’s women Glasgow project, which I visited last week, is a very good example of a project that is helping to make a difference by reducing the risk of women reoffending. It is joining up and integrating services in a collective way. The team in the centre comprises not just social work but housing, the police and the prison service, which has staff seconded to it. They are all working in partnership to try to reduce reoffending among the women who are referred to it. In Edinburgh, the willow centre takes a similar approach, as does the centre in Aberdeen.
Other models are being taken forward. In Lanarkshire, the criminal justice social work team has a specific women’s team working with women offenders, testing that model. In some of our rural areas, an outreach approach is taken, which is about helping to support women in their community much more effectively in order to test that approach. What works in Glasgow will not necessarily work in the Highlands, so we need to test different models.
All the work that we are supporting now will help to inform us on the most effective way to support women in the community and to reduce reoffending. An evaluation is being wrapped around all those initiatives to help us to understand better. We will have the results of some of that evaluation work next year, which will allow us to assess the best way forward.
Having just come into the job, I am considering how we can draw that type of work together much more effectively in order to share good practice across the sector. I am starting to develop my early thinking around how we might be able to achieve that on the criminal justice side, given some of my experience of how we went about it on the health side.
We are doing a range of work, using different models and approaches, which we are evaluating and which will all feed into our thinking around how we can work better to reduce reoffending and support women much more effectively in the community.