Scottish Public Service Awards 2026

Award Categories:

The Campbell Christie Public Service Reform Award

An award for the team that best embodies the spirit of public service reform as envisaged by Campbell Christie in his ground-breaking vision for public service delivery of the future. With a focus on prevention, working across departmental and organisational boundaries, placing the citizen at the centre of service delivery, and working efficiently to tackle the causes of social ills, rather than solely the symptoms.

The Campaign of the Year Award

This award recognises exceptional performance by a team or individual in the delivery of a highly engaging, imaginative and creative communications campaign that can demonstrate real impact. Campaigns can be either internal or external stakeholders/audiences, use any channel, and any budget. The judges are looking for measurable change, campaign recognition and real audience engagement.

The Project and Programme Management Award

This award celebrates a team or individual demonstrating excellent practice in project, programme and portfolio management, which has led to positive change for good. The judges are looking for why the project, programme or portfolio management stood out as exceptional, and what positive impacts this had. Why was this project head and shoulders above the rest and what identifiable approaches and processes were implemented that resulted in positive outcomes and ambitions being achieved.

The Collaboration Award

Collaboration across sectors, whether that be with government, public, third or private sectors is a results-driven way to achieving better outcomes by identifying issues, learning from each other and truly working together in partnership to achieve a common goal. This category is open to any organisation that works in collaboration with others including industry and the wider business community to realise ambitions and achieve better outcomes than they could reach on their own. Judges will be looking for partnerships that can demonstrate excellence in collaborative working, bridging sectoral gaps, fostering innovative thinking, and implementing cross-sector initiatives in their work. This might include examples of contract negotiations and management, commercial policy development, smart procurement, best practice supplier management, cutting across bureaucracies or simply implementing new models of public service delivery that help to turn collective aspirations into reality by playing to individual strengths.

The Leadership Award

The Leadership Award is open to any individual who has demonstrated outstanding leadership qualities at any level. Nominations should demonstrate how the nominee’s leadership has inspired those around them, and the impact they have made on civic society.

The Digital Public Services Award

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This award recognises the innovative use of digital technology to solve problems and/or improve efficiencies and ultimately deliver improvements in public services to the citizen. The judges are looking for measurable outcomes.

The Community Engagement Award

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This award recognises the work of public bodies and their delivery partners in ensuring that the communities they serve are fully engaged in the development and delivery of public services in their area. Nominees should show how these links have been made and describe what the outcome was.

The Voluntary Sector Partnership Award 

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This award will recognise charities or community base organisations working together with public sector organisations to deliver better outcomes in public services. Increasingly, these partnerships provide the day-to-day services that are vital to people and communities throughout Scotland. They are often crucial for the wellbeing, or even survival, of citizens and community assets that could otherwise slip through the cracks.

The Sustainability Award

A submission in this category should demonstrate how an organisation or team has implemented policies, campaigns or technologies to help tackle the climate emergency, contribute to net zero emissions or to increase resilience to climate change in civic society. This award recognises those working towards a greener and more sustainable economy that benefits all. Entries should be supported by results.

The Policy into Practice Award

This award recognises a project or approach by an individual, organisation or community-based initiative that has applied public policy to an issue to make a real difference in terms of practical delivery, user experience or costs effectiveness. This award will recognise the efficacy of taking a paper policy designed in theory and putting it into real-life practice and being able to demonstrate its worth in terms of improving the lives of Scots.

The Lifetime Achievement Award

The Lifetime Achievement award recognises the achievements of someone who holds the good of public service to their very core. This is not open to public nomination, was chosen by the judges and will be announced on the night.