Joint inspections of services for children and young people
Our approach
In 2017, Scottish Ministers asked us to work with scrutiny partners to take a more focused look at children and young people in need of care and protection. Our joint inspections therefore take account of their experiences and outcomes by looking at the services provided for them by health visitors, school nurses, teachers, doctors, social workers, police officers and lots of other people who work with them and their families.
Children and young people have told us about the importance of being able to experience sincere human contact and enduring relationships. They want to be able to build trust through consistent relationships with adults and they want to be supported to maintain contact with those people who are most important in their lives. Our approach therefore looks carefully at how well services and systems are organised so that they can experience continuity in their care and develop and sustain lasting relationships.
We believe that staff who are well trained and who feel valued and empowered, are more likely to be able to provide high quality services for children and young people. We therefore explore how well staff are supported to carry out their task.
We know that partners recognise that assessment and planning are critical to ensure the safety of, and improving outcomes for, children and young people. However, we also know that performance in assessment and planning is not as consistently strong across the country as it needs to be and we will look to see if robust quality assurance and high quality reflective supervision are in place.
Our inspections also consider whether legal measures are being used appropriately to achieve security and stability for vulnerable children. Inspections include a focus on the role played by those working in adult services to protect children and young people and support sustained positive change for them and their families.
Strong collaborative leadership is essential within the challenging context of providing high quality public services in an integrated landscape. We consider the effectiveness of collaborative leadership, including leadership of the child protection committee and its relationship with chief officers. We look at how well leaders can demonstrate what difference they are collectively making to the lives of children in need of protection and those for whom they are corporate parents. We also identify any barriers that affect continued improved performance.
We started the current round of joint inspections of services for children in need of care and protection in August 2018 and will continue to review and revise the approach over the course of these inspections. Following the suspension of joint inspections in 2020 due to Covid 19, the current round has resumed with a focus on children at risk of harm.
How we do it
Our inspections last for a number of months. We collect information about the area before we visit it. This helps us to understand what happens there and what is affecting the way that services are being provided.
During the inspection, a team of inspectors from the Care Inspectorate and other scrutiny partners:
- speak with the staff
- speak with children and young people and listen to their views
- speak with parents and carers
- read information about the children and young people.
This gives us the chance to find out if children, young people and their families are getting the help that they need and if services are making a difference to their lives. What individual people tell us during inspection is confidential. Our reports do not include any information about them or their family, or anything that could identify them. However, we do have a duty to pass on information if there are concerns about someone’s safety.
After our inspection, we publish a report on our website about what we found for the area. Our inspection reports set out what works well and what could improve. We expect the community planning partnership to take action on any recommendations we make for improvements.
Getting involved
What you think really matters. If we are inspecting your area, and you have experience of services, you may want to speak to us about the help that you have been getting.
We will offer a range of ways for you to give us feedback. As well as a survey we will arrange one-to-one discussions and group meetings. Our one-to-one discussions can take place in person, or we can contact you by phone or other ways such as Facetime or MS Teams.
If you give us information anonymously, we may not be able to get in contact with you if you raise concerns about your own safety or the safety of anyone else. If you have such concerns, we would encourage you to contact your local authority and ask for their child protection or adult protection service. You can also contact Childline on 0800 1111. If we have any concerns about the safety of individuals, we will share this with protection agencies in the relevant area.
Our inspection team also includes young inspection volunteers. These are young people aged 18 – 26 with experience of care services who help us with our inspections. If you are a young person, you can choose to speak with one of them and you can have someone to support you when you meet them. If you are a young person and want to know more about becoming a young inspection volunteer or how to get involved, click here to find out more.
The Promise
The Care Inspectorate is #Keeping The Promise of the independent care review. We are working across six workstreams internally and externally to influence and support application of the Promise,
Our strategic scrutiny children and young people team is committed to ensuring that our scrutiny and improvement activity is focused on the experiences of children and the impact of services on their lives.
Inspection volunteers with care experience are key members if our local scrutiny teams. We will amplify the voice of the child in what we do, how we do it and how we report on it.
More information
The Guide provides information for community planning partnerships (CPP) about the process for the joint inspection of services for children and young people in need of care and protection. This includes services for children under the age of 18 years, or young people up to 26 years if they have been previously looked after. It should be read in conjunction with the quality framework for children and young people in need of care and protection (QIF) for self-evaluation of services.
Find out more:
- Our joint inspection reports can be found here.
- Joint inspections of services for children and young people in need of care and protection Review of findings from the inspection programme 2018-2020
- Joint inspections of services for children and young people A report on the findings of inspections 2014-16
- The Guide
Joint review of diversion from prosecution
In this joint review, we sought to assess the operation and impact of diversion from prosecution in Scotland. Working in partnership we provided an overview of diversion practice from a policing, prosecution and justice social work perspective, highlighted what was working well and explored any barriers to the more effective use of diversion.
The review was carried out by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS), HM Inspectorate of Prosecution in Scotland (IPS), the Care Inspectorate, and HM Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland (HMIPS) (the scrutiny partners).
We considered:
- the extent to which the police, the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) and justice social work, alongside other community justice partners, shared a vision for diversion from prosecution and collaborated on a strategy for delivery, while respecting the important principle of independent prosecutorial decision-making
- the effectiveness of systems and processes that supported diversion from prosecution and the progress made in implementing the national guidelines on diversion
- the extent to which the impact of diversion was understood and the intended outcomes were being achieved
We considered the individual and collective roles that the justice partners play at the various stages in the diversion process:
- the Standard Prosecution Report (SPR)
- the decision to divert
- the referral to justice social work
- the suitability assessment and the response by COPFS
- the diversion intervention
- the completion report and the response by COPFS
- communication with the accused
- communication with the complainer.
In support of our review, we gathered evidence from a range of sources including:
- a review of relevant strategies, policies, guidance, procedures and other documentation relating to diversion from prosecution
- analysis of data on diversion
- a survey of all community justice partnerships in Scotland regarding the operation of diversion from prosecution in their local area
- extensive interviews with those involved or with an interest in the diversion process
- a review of cases in which an initial decision to divert the accused from prosecution had been taken by COPFS, as well as some cases in which diversion did not appear to have been considered.
We published a report of our findings in February 2023. The review report provides more detail on our methods and full details of our findings and recommendations.
Justice
Background
The strategic justice team in the Care Inspectorate was established in 2018. Since that time we have undertaken a range of justice social work related scrutiny, assurance and improvement activities, often in collaboration with partners.
The Scottish Government also tasked the Care Inspectorate with producing a self-evaluation guide to support quality improvement for community justice in Scotland and to offer support and guidance in using the guide to deliver national and local outcomes. These expectations are published within the Community Justice Performance Framework.
We published an overview report in December 2021. This report provides an overview of the scrutiny and assurance work undertaken between 2018-2021, and summarises the findings from our initial activities.
Our work
Please use the links below for further details on our scrutiny, assurance and improvement work and to access our published reports:
- Community justice social work: inspections of community payback orders
- Community justice partnerships: supported and validated self-evaluation
- Community justice social work: throughcare review
- Joint review of diversion from prosecution
- Thematic review of prison-based social work
- Justice social work: Self-evaluation of performance, quality and outcomes – a national review
- Quality assurance of serious incident reviews
Collaboration work with partners
In addition to our previously noted scrutiny and improvement work, the Care Inspectorate has a long-standing commitment as guest inspectors in inspections of prisons and other institutions led by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons in Scotland (HMIPS).
Getting involved
We are committed to listening to and hearing from people with living experience during all of our activities. We are also committed to embedding an ethical, person-centred approach that promotes best practice for meaningfully involving people with living experience of the justice system.
If you have any questions about our work please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Justice social work: Self-evaluation of performance, quality and outcomes
Aim 2 of the National Strategy for Community Justice is to “Ensure that robust and high-quality community interventions and public protection arrangements are consistently available across Scotland”. In relation to community sentences, there is an associated priority action to “Ensure that those given community sentences are supervised and supported appropriately to protect the public, promote desistence from offending and enable rehabilitation by delivering high quality, consistently available, trauma-informed services and programmes.”
Key to delivering on these intentions, and the overarching aim, is the ability of justice social work services to demonstrate that the supervision and support offered to those on community sentences is of a high quality. To develop an overview of what was working well and where improvement was required in this regard, the Care Inspectorate undertook a national review, using a self-evaluation approach between September 2024 and March 2025.
The review sought to:
- evaluate the extent to which justice social work services were able to evidence performance, quality and outcomes in relation to community-based sentences.
- explore the factors that impacted justice social work services’ ability to confidently and robustly demonstrate the effectiveness and impact of community support and supervision.
As part of this work, all 32 local authority justice social work services completed a structured self-evaluation in which they considered their current approaches to gathering and reporting on performance, quality and outcomes and the factors that were enabling or hindering this work.
Thereafter, we undertook a range of activities to validate the self-evaluations in six local authority justice services. This allowed us to better understand the strengths and challenges at a local level. The activities included:
- a review of documentary evidence referenced in the local authority self-evaluation
- focus groups and interviews with senior leaders, operational managers and staff
- focus groups and interviews with people on community sentences
We published a report of our findings in May 2025. The report contains more detail on the methods we used.
Learning reviews
The Care Inspectorate, on behalf of the Scottish Government, acts as a central repository for all learning reviews carried out by child protection, adult protection and public protection committees in Scotland.
As part of our general duty of furthering improvement in the quality of social services, the Care Inspectorate is responsible for reviewing the effectiveness of the processes for each learning review and providing observations to individual chief officer groups and protection committees. This forms part of the Care Inspectorate’s improvement remit. The key aim in relation to learning reviews is to assist the sector in its continual development and improvement of the learning review approach.
National Guidance for Adult Protection Committees; Undertaking Learning Reviews was published in May 2022. The revised National Guidance for Child Protection Committees for Undertaking Learning Reviews was published in 2024. Both guidance documents clearly set out that adult and child protection committees should inform the Care Inspectorate of two things. Firstly, the decision about whether they are proceeding with a learning review and if not, the reasons for not doing so. Secondly, the outcome of the learning review, including an anonymised copy of the review report which should be sent to us.
For all situations considered under learning review guidance, a decision notification form should be completed. This electronic notification form should be completed at the point when a decision has been made whether to conduct a learning review, or to detail the reasons for not doing so. Committees are required to notify the Care Inspectorate of their decision to proceed, or not to proceed, to learning review using the learning review notification forms below.
In circumstances where protection committees agree to carry out an alternative review approach for learning they should submit anonymised completed reports or minutes that record learning and recommendations to the Care Inspectorate via secure e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. This will enable the Care Inspectorate to use the learning from these alternative approaches to inform the content of annual national overview reports. The Care Inspectorate will not provide observations to partnerships on these types of submissions.
Submission of learning review reports
Please submit the full learning review report via secure email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Any queries can also be directed to this address.
Link inspectors and relationship managers
The Care Inspectorate provides a designated link team for local authorities and strategic partnerships. This is because there are multiple services of different types and a need for regular planned contact to discuss emerging issues across the breadth of their work. Link teams consist of a strategic inspector, who is responsible for scrutiny carried out at authority or strategic partnership level; a relationship manager for adult care services and complaints about care services; and a relationship manager for children’s care services and registration.
Relationship managers also provide a designated point of contact for larger providers who operate multiple services.
Managers responsible for services for children also link to each of the six regional collaboratives that have now been established across the country.
Named strategic link inspectors and relationship managers can be found here.
Find information on the link inspector role for council and partnership staff here.
You can get information about the link inspector for a particular local authority area by e-mailing the strategic support team at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Make Every Moment Count
We have worked with a team of experts to develop the ‘Make Every Moment Count’ resource, an information leaflet which contains easy to read and simple guidance for everyone supporting older people in a care home or at home.
The resource highlights how making the most of every moment can make a real difference to a person’s quality of life in simple but very meaningful ways.
The five key messages are:
- Get to know me
- It's not just what you do... it's how you make me feel
- Know what I can do and support me to do it
- Help me feel comfortable, safe and secure in my surroundings
- Remember little things all add up
By providing key messages on how to better understand an individual’s needs, values and lifestyle, the guide will help people working in care services to deliver an enhanced experience for Scotland’s older people.
Hear more about the resource in our video.
To order copies of this information leaflet, poster or DVD, please call our enquiries team on 0345 600 9527 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Some signposts to useful information
www.knowledge.scot.nhs.uk/dementia
http://www.nmhdu.org.uk/silo/files/lets-respect-toolkit-for-care-homes-.pdf
http://www.bhfactive.org.uk/home/index.html
http://www.active-ageing-events.org.uk/home/index.html
Actively Engaged
MAPPA review
The Care Inspectorate and HMICS gave a commitment to work collaboratively with other scrutiny bodies to undertake a proportionate, risk-based and intelligence led review of the multi-agency public protection arrangements (MAPPA) in Scotland. The joint review foccused on Category 1 offenders subject to the Sex Offender Notification Requirements.
The review was published on Thursday 26 November 2015.
The purpose of the joint thematic review was be to assess the state, efficiency and effectiveness of the MAPPA in Scotland, in terms of keeping people safe and reducing the potential risk of serious harm by registered sex offenders in our communities.
The review objectives were to:
- assess how effective the responsible authorities are in the discharge of their statutory duties, under terms of the Management of Offenders etc. (Scotland) Act 2005, including adherence to national guidance and good practice.
- assess how effective the processes are in relation to MAPPA Significant Case Reviews AND the arrangements that are in place to promote organisational learning and development across the responsible authorities.
While the report notes that the number of registered sex offenders in Scotland continues to rise, it also highlights key strengths in the way they are managed by organisations including the police, social work services and the prison service
You can download a copy of the report here and read the press release in our news archive.
A progress review was published in June 2017. You can find the report here.