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GROUP UPDATE: We will soon be meeting with Shirley-Anne Somerville to discuss our Female Only Provision Report & recommendations, & the factors our group is arguing must be considered & assessed in relation to the govt’s GRA proposals. The Govt has engaged with our report, & we >
>look forward to our meeting & also to providing updates in due course. We have also been invited to meet with the Scottish Prison Service (SPS management has also engaged with our FOPR) & will update on this process too. We've also spoken with the Head of Open Govt in Scotland >
>(the Open Govt team is responsible for delivering the Scottish Govt’s programme of reforms on open govt in order to become more open & accessible, fulfilling the commitments of Scotland’s membership of the Open Government Partnership, an international collaboration of almost >
>100 govts) & we have been invited to contribute to their work. We hope to help develop a set of principles that would ensure policy making is much more open, & policy makers seek out diversity in terms of the organisations & views they engage with, & that working class people >
>are involved in the policy making process (we are almost entirely absent atm) & that barriers are removed for working class people, particularly women, in terms of the pathway into politics. Again we will update on this process as it progresses. Additionally, we were invited to>
>respond to the EHRC draft school guidance in August, & with the agreement of the EHRC we will be able to publish an edited version of our response next week on our website. We have also asked the Scottish Govt to draw up a full equality & human rights guidance for schools, >
>rather than simply equality & human rights guidance for LGBT children. We believe that all protected classes of children deserve specific consideration in terms of how schools can best uphold their equality protections & human rights, & considering govt funded guidance that has>
>been endorsed by local authorities has been used in Scottish schools that in fact infringes on the human rights of girls, it is eminently clear that girls in particular are in need of specific guidance in order to ensure their protections & rights are both understood & upheld, >
>however for now the govt has refused to do this. We intend to now make our case to John Swinney, initially via a letter we will publish next week along with our response to the EHRC draft school guidance, & we will also take action to gather support for the guidance we are >
>asking for. The Govt has however said that it welcomes & values our input re the LGBT guidance & has also offered to meet with us re this in due course. We will also be fundraising next week to help us move on to the next stage of our work, which will include publishing >
>guidance for the Govt’s GRA consultation (the consultation is due to be published before the end of the year). We are working on much else & we will keep people updated as we move forward, but we hope this update helps people see more of what we are doing. We have also been >
>unable to be online much in quite some time, so we apologise if we have missed anything, & if anyone has been trying to reach us on here please try again, we will be able to keep track of our notifications again now.
