Inspections overview

• Inspection types
  
• Inspection teams 
• Inspection methodology
• Inspection activities
• Inspection reports  
• Quality assurance
• Inspection governance  
• Covid-19

Inspection types

Our specific inspection focus and programme at any one time is agreed with the Scottish Government and published in the Care Inspectorate’s Scrutiny, Assurance and Improvement Plan. We take a number of different approaches to inspection, designed to meet different scrutiny objectives. These include, but are not limited to:

Inspections and joint Inspections: inspections of individual local authorities or partnerships in relation to key priority areas. Local authorities are identified for inspection based on a combination of risk assessment and rotation of scrutiny activity.

Progress reviews: return visits to a local authority or partnership to check progress following a previous inspection and set of recommendations. Progress reviews are usually (but not always) carried out where the original inspection identified significant areas for improvement.

Thematic reviews/inspections: inspections carried out in a limited number of local authority or partnership areas to explore a particular area of policy or practice that is of national interest. These reviews may or may not evaluate the performance of individual authorities or partnerships but are primarily designed to explore the national picture relating to a given theme and make national recommendations.

Supported self-evaluations: we are always keen to support and encourage self-evaluation. We may at times work proactively with identified local authorities and partnerships to support and validate their self-evaluation of particular areas of activity.

Inquiries: this approach uses an abbreviated approach to explore a particular theme or issue across the country. It is usually designed as a discrete piece of work, carried out over a relatively short time to produce a quick report that provides insight into the key issues relating to the theme.

Inspection teams

Our inspection teams have an inspection lead with responsibility for effectively delivering and concluding the individual inspection. The lead is supported by a deputy lead and a team of inspectors drawn from the Care Inspectorate and relevant partner scrutiny bodies. Our inspections may be supported by associate assessors and people with lived experience (inspection volunteers). The administration and organisation of inspection activities is managed by a team of strategic support officers.

The size of an inspection team will be determined by the scope, methodology and planned length of the inspection. Sometimes, additional resources may be allocated for specific parts of the inspection. However, most inspections will have a core team of between six and 10 members.

How resources are deployed across the different activities of the inspection, and the timing of activities, is captured on a plan that we call the inspection footprint.

Inspection methodology

For each set of inspections, we develop a quality framework (QIF). The quality framework outlines what we expect the quality of the service provided to be. The frameworks we use in our strategic inspection work are based on the EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) excellence model, widely used by organisations for managing change and improving performance. The Health and Social Care Standards are woven throughout the quality indicators.

Overall, the QIF provides a model to support inspection. We examine:

• performance and the outcomes that services achieve for the children and adults who use them
• the processes that support service delivery
• the vision, leadership, management and planning of services.

The quality frameworks are also available to local authorities & partnerships for them to use for self-evaluation purposes.

 Inspection activities

The activities carried out by inspection teams to gather information can differ across inspections. However, there are some activities which have been proven to consistently provide good information and are therefore used regularly as part of inspections. These include:

Information and communication

The local authority or partnership can expect to receive full information about the inspection.

Most inspections provide a written guidance document of some sort, explaining the various stages and activities of the inspection, along with timescales.

In most inspections, we ask the local authority or partnership to nominate a local co-ordinator to manage and co-ordinate the various activities for them.

Throughout the course of the inspection, there are pre-planned meetings between key members of the inspection team and the local authority or partnership. These may be called professional or partnership discussions. Their key functions are: for the inspection team to feedback on findings so far; for the local authority or partnership to reflect on those findings; for the parties to discuss arrangements and plans for the next phase of the inspection.

Self-evaluation

It is a priority for the Care Inspectorate to support local authorities and partnerships to evaluate their own progress. Most of our inspections ask the local authority or partnership to provide a position statement and supporting evidence at the beginning of the inspection to help inform the inspection team’s understanding and formulate lines of enquiry.

Talking to children and adults who use services

Understanding the experience of people who use social work and social care services is fundamental to inspection, and we use a range of methods to gather the views of both people and unpaid carers. These are likely to include surveys, interviews, events, focus groups, and a range of activities developed to support specific inspections.

Reviewing records

Reading the records of children and adults who use services (also known as file reading) is a rich source of evidence for the inspection teams and is a part of many inspections. It provides understanding of how processes work and gives a picture of how staff interact with people using services.

Support networks

As well as reading records, many inspections include further examination of the care and support journeys experienced by children and adults by meeting with the staff and other significant people who have been part of that journey. This means that inspectors are able to further explore questions that have arisen from reading case records.

Staff surveys

Many inspections include surveys issued to staff. The inspection team often requests the help of the local authority or partnership in distributing the survey and encouraging staff to respond. The arrangements for issuing the survey, and which staff should receive it, will be discussed with the inspection co-ordinator by the inspection lead and strategic support officer.

Interviews and focus groups with key stakeholders

Most inspections involve focus groups or interviews with key stakeholders, including staff, managers, senior leaders, representatives of other statutory and third sector organisations. Often this takes place towards the end of an inspection as it gives the inspection team a good opportunity to discuss themes and issues that have emerged during other inspection activities.

Inspection reports

Inspection teams use regular team meetings to identify and explore themes that emerge from inspection activities. We make sure that potential findings are triangulated and corroborated through a range of activities before accepting them.

Inspection reports for each strand of inspection activity are tailored to the requirements of that inspection, so there are differences between the reports produced by each strategic inspection team. There will also be differences in the reports produced by each team when they are working on different inspection themes.

However, in general, strategic inspection reports can be expected to contain:

• a summary of key findings and/or strengths and areas for improvement
• an analysis of the inspection findings based on the relevant quality framework
• some form of evaluation of the local authority or partnership’s performance – which may or may not have grades attached
• recommendations for action and/or improvement.

Quality assurance

We aim to achieve a high quality for all our work and want it to have maximum value for all our stakeholders and help to improve the experience of people who use services. To help us achieve this, each inspection programme has a range of quality assurance arrangements:

Each programme has arrangements for review of the inspection approach and methodology which take account of the learning from each inspection while balancing the need for consistency. A key source of learning is from post inspection questionnaires and feedback from inspection leads and team members. All strategic scrutiny teams are represented on a forum to discuss potential improvements to inspection methodology from experiences across the different workstreams and promote consistency wherever possible. When reading the records of people who use services during inspection, a proportion of the sample is double read to ensure consistency of evaluations and we provide training for all record readers.

At the reporting stage of our inspections, inspection leads present their inspection team’s findings and draft report to a ‘quality and consistency’ panel with representation from each partner scrutiny body for discussion and comment. Reports are then issued to the area inspected for an accuracy check before final editing and publication.

Information governance

Our approach to processing personal data is set out in full in our organisational privacy notice.

Covid-19

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on social work and social care services across the country. Because of this, most of our strategic inspection work was paused between March 2020 and spring 2021. Since then, strategic inspections have recommenced with some adjustments to reflect the ongoing risks posed by covid-19 and the pressure on local authority and partnership services.

We continue to be responsive to the trends of the pandemic as we plan for and deliver inspection activities. We have also incorporated learning from the pandemic period in relation to our use of technology, and expect to be using a blend of onsite and distance approaches to carry out inspections moving forward.

About us

Who are we

We work in four teams: adults, children, justice and protection. Each team is led by a service manager and we report through two chief inspectors to the executive director of assurance and improvement. We are supported by a team of strategic support officers who provide support and co-ordination to all our scrutiny activities.

What we do

These are the core functions of the strategic inspection team.

• Carrying out strategic inspection work.
• Providing support to local authorities and partnerships through our link inspector role.
• Quality assurance functions – monitoring the completion and quality of:
  • Learning reviews (significant case reviews) in relation to children and adults.
  • Serious incident reviews (SIRs) in relation to people on community payback orders, drug treatment and testing orders and people supervised on release from prison.
  • Investigations into the deaths of looked after children.

Who we work with

We know that outcomes for children and adults are affected by many factors.

Different services and organisations are involved in providing care and support to vulnerable children and adults and in most cases, social work services are planned and delivered in collaboration with partners.

We also understand that children and adults are all different, with a wide range of life circumstances and experiences.

For this reason, we do not carry out our scrutiny work in isolation but in partnership with children, adults and other organisations. This helps us to be confident that we are taking all relevant factors into account in our scrutiny work.

Inspection volunteers and people with lived experience

Wherever possible, we involve people with lived experience of using services, or of caring for someone who does, in our scrutiny work. We know that this keeps us grounded and often makes it easier for children and adults to share their experiences with us.

The Care Inspectorate has a team that recruits and supports volunteers to work on inspections across our organisation, including strategic inspections. There is a specific team to support young people with experience of care services, between the ages of 18 and 26.

If you have lived experience of social work and social care services, or care for someone who does, and would like to know more about becoming involved in strategic inspections, please email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Associate assessors

Associate assessors are professionals from statutory and third sector organisations who work at a strategic level and have significant practice or management experience in services for children, adults or justice. They work as part of an inspection team for one inspection.

We believe that including associate assessors brings current practice perspectives to our strategic inspections. They can help ensure we are partnership-orientated and contribute to our understanding of the contemporary picture of service planning and delivery. At the same time, this involvement provides an ideal opportunity to help build capacity for joint self-evaluation and improvement in local partnerships.

Please check our frequently asked questions for more information. 

We are not currently recruiting associate assessors. However, if you are interested in becoming an associate assessor, please check our website which we will update when we are next recruiting. 

Our scrutiny partners

Many of the functions of planning, delivering and monitoring services for children and young people and adults and older people are carried out by more than one agency or organisation. For example, through community justice partnerships, children’s services partnerships and health and social care partnerships. So, we often collaborate with these other scrutiny bodies.

• Education Scotland

• Healthcare Improvement Scotland

• His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland

• His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland

• Inspectorate of Prosecution in Scotland

• Audit Scotland

• Mental Welfare Commission

• Scottish Housing Regulator