The focus of our joint inspection - children and young people subject to compulsory orders and living at home with their parents

Over the past four years, the Care Inspectorate and scrutiny partners have undertaken 14 joint inspections of services for children and young people at risk of harm. You can read our overview report here. Aside from joint inspections, we also undertook a series of thematic reviews on specific topics including secure care; cross border placements; services for disabled children and young people and services for care experienced young people.

The last time that we carried out joint inspections of services for children who are looked after was between 2018 and 2020, in our joint inspections of services for children in need of care and protection. In our overview report we noted that:

• Children and young people subject to compulsory supervision orders and living at home with parents experienced the least improvement in their wellbeing, when compared to children looked after away from home in kinship, foster or residential care.
• Partnerships struggled to find the evidence to demonstrate tangible improvements in the wellbeing of looked after children and young people and in understanding performance trends concerning different looked after groups.
• There had been some progress in narrowing the educational attainment gap between looked after children and their peers, however, it remained too great.
• Not all care experienced children and young people had the same opportunities to share their views and meaningfully influence service delivery.
• The collaborative leadership of child protection was much more robust and embedded than that for corporate parenting.

There are also a range of other evidence sources that indicate there is a need for further exploration of the impact of services for children and young people subject to compulsory supervision orders and living at home with parents. In particular, Scottish Government’s publication: “Educational Outcomes for looked after children 2022/23” evidences lower school attendance rates, higher school exclusion rates, lower positive destination rates and poorer attainment rates for children looked after at home, when compared to the wider group of looked after children.