Good links and training for housing, social work and the voluntary sector has meant that the service is receiving appropriate referrals and is meeting a large previously unmet need. We need to develop a learning culture in Scotland where we spread information better about good practice. There is plenty of good practice and published research but this does not always reach the right people. We were struck by the enthusiasm of the participants at our workshop to learn from each other and the fact that for most this was the first time they had attended an event involving people outside their own immediate area of work. There are lessons here for training provisions by all organisations.
Training needs to provide a broader learning experience.
Our recommendations on training have already addressed this point. We further recommend that the SSIN network seeks to foster the development of a learning culture in Scotland by championing the dissemination of information about good practice across agencies and organisations. We heard from many sources of the problems of a multiplicity of partnerships, sometimes with overlapping responsibilities. The same people may be attending a succession of meetings on similar topics under the guise of different partnerships. One of the problems has been a tendency to set up a partnership as the response to every problem without sufficient thought about whether the approach was necessary and how it related to other initiatives and other agency responsibilities.