External Training
Scottish Women's Aid training services are designed to provide practitioners from a range of settings with information about the impacts and consequences of domestic abuse and other forms of gender-based violence. The focus is to build skills and confidence in working with survivors and perpetrators, considering what effective support interventions look like. We work with a range of trainers, from specialist projects such as Rape Crisis Scotland and Working With Men, to ensure high quality learning opportunities. Practitioners from social work, education, health, housing, the police and prosecutors regularly take part in the training events which are run through a nationally advertised bi-annual programme and through specially contracted events.
For more information go here or for bespoke training requests, contact Nel Whiting, Learning and Development worker.
Support for our Members
SWA has provided a range of resources to Women’s Aid groups supporting them in evidencing the impact of their services for women, children and young people through outcome evaluation. These resources include 2 complimentary Monitoring and Evaluation frameworks for evaluating women and children and young people’s services, an extensive guidance document on monitoring and evaluation and a wide variety of tools and techniques for measuring outcomes for women and children and young people’s services. Various courses of training in monitoring and evaluation have also been provided. Much of this work has been done in partnership, most importantly with Women’s Aid groups but also with Evaluation Support Scotland, and in the case of the children’s services resources, the Scottish Government. (Children’s services resources were developed for the evaluation of the Scottish Government Children’s Service Women’s Aid Fund.) Some of the tools provided to groups are pre-existing ones, however some were developed specifically by SWA were tested in a small trial with children and young people from one Women’s Aid group.
For more information go here or contact Dr Cheryl Sutherland Stewart, Information and Research worker.
Women's Aid National Service Standards
The standards have been developed to support benchmarking practice in specialist domestic abuse services. Criteria are underpinned by service user feedback, monitoring and evaluation, and have been developed by a working group made up of Women’s Aid workers, facilitated by SWA. The standards are currently being piloted by the working group alongside two additional groups. The standards will be an effective way of measuring the value of specialist Women’s Aid services, and they are being written to ensure that the value of specialist women’s aid services is clearly defined.
For more information on the standards contact Ash Kuloo , Learning and Development Co-ordinator.