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.

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.

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. 

More details about our approach

Our inspections will report on the experiences of children and young people subject to compulsory supervision orders living at home with their parents. When we use the term ‘children and young people’ in this page we are referring to this group. This includes services for children and young people under the age of 18 years at the point of involvement with services within the last two years.  When we say a child living at home with a parent, we mean a child who has lived at home with at least one parent within the last two years. When we refer to parents we mean birth or adoptive parents and parent’s partners where they are not the child’s parent but reside with them and have a significant caring role.  We do not mean formal carers for example a foster carer who provides respite care or a kinship carer.

Through a joint scrutiny approach, we will consider the experiences and views of children and young people. We will explore how well services are directed and delivered to ensure children and young people are supported to live at home within their parents to achieve positive outcomes.

The scope and timeline of the joint inspections

• Our legislative basis is the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010, section 115.
• We undertake joint inspections with scrutiny partners, including Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Education Scotland, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland and young inspection volunteers. At times, we also involve associate assessors in our joint inspections.
• We will identify up to four local authority areas in 2025/2026 in which to conduct our joint inspections.
• The joint inspections will have a multi-agency scrutiny approach, liaising with community planning partners and corporate parenting partners responsible and accountable for this area of practice.
• We will take a scoping approach to our joint inspections, that is, learning iteratively as the inspection progresses to determine the best ways to seek the evidence required.
• We will conduct each joint inspection over a 12-week period, publishing one final report per local authority area.
• We will focus on a retrospective two-year period and scrutinise the impact of services for children and young people in that period of time.

The principles of the joint inspections

We will use a rights-based approach in the joint inspections, embedding the experiences of children and young people at the heart of planning, implementation and analysis of findings. Our joint inspections are underpinned by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. For example, we respect the right of children and young people to have their views heard by making participation of children, young people and families a core element of our approach. Our approach and design will reflect what children and families have told us matter the most to them, as encapsulated within the Promise.

We will consider the planning and progress that has been made by children’s services partnerships as they seek to keep The Promise. We will consider the five Promise Foundations and related priorities of family, care, voice, people and scaffolding which enable children to grow up loved, safe and respected.

Our approach and framework

Our approach will be proportionate to the evidence required, with a hybrid model of on-site and virtual activities. Our methods will include gathering information from local partnerships about the relevant services they provide and reviewing publicly available documents.

We will use the quality framework for children and young people in need of care and protection (November 2022). This framework is informed by the principles of the European Framework for Quality Management (EFQM) model which incorporates three tenets:

Our approach to reporting

We will publish one written report following each joint inspection. We are committed to improving accessible reporting specific to children and young people, this will involve further consultation with our young inspection volunteers.

In our report we will consider three key lines of enquiry. We will evaluate four quality indicators on our six-point scale. These are:

Resources

Our resources pages are currently being updated to provide information for community planning partnerships (CPP) about the process for the joint inspections of services for children and young people subject to compulsory supervision orders living at home with their parents.