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Recommendations
Based on the findings of this review, we have identified seven recommendations that National Records of Scotland (NRS) should address to further enhance the statistics’ Trustworthiness, Quality and Value.
Recommendation 1: To keep users informed and support transparency, NRS should ensure that any delays to future population estimate releases are communicated promptly and prominently to users.
Recommendation 2: To widen engagement and reach new users, NRS should explore the use of additional user engagement activities, taking into consideration user suggestions.
Recommendation 3: To further improve transparency about how it responds to user needs, NRS should explain known data gaps, constraints on meeting user requests, and planned developments in its MYE and SAPE publications.
Recommendation 4: Prior to the next release of each of its next population statistics publications, NRS should transition all supporting documents from PDF to HTML to enhance accessibility of its MYE publications for users. NRS should also prominently signpost its links to the interactive charts within the main publication and improve navigation between old and current releases.
Recommendation 5: To strengthen the description of its quality assurance practices, NRS should conduct a review of its processes and update its documentation where necessary to reflect all QA activities. As part of this review, NRS should consider its description of the level of assurance applied to administrative data used in the production of the MYE and SAPE, in particular health data.
Recommendation 6: NRS should investigate the scale and extent of underestimation of young adults in the MYE internal migration flows, exploring the use of alternative data sources such as the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) data and new methods as part of its research. An update on this work should be provided at the time of the next MYE publication in summer 2027.
Recommendation 7: NRS should consider its approach to communicating trend changes and enhance its description of uncertainty associated with the MYE (including SAPE) for the next publication. For MYE, this should include the possibility of illustrating uncertainty to supplement existing explanations with more detail on geographic areas or factors that may contribute to greater or less confidence in the estimates.