Children and young people

Our role in children and young people’s services 

It is our job to make sure that every child and young person experiencing care in Scotland gets the best quality of care that meets their needs and choices and protects their rights. This is whether they live at home with their families, live in a children’s home, are fostered or adopted, stay in secure or school care accommodation or use respite services. We also inspect some services that provide care for families, such as women’s refuges, and housing support services that cater for young people.

Our strategic team assesses how well professionals from different disciplines and agencies work together. This is to make sure that children and young people who need care and protection are kept safe and their needs met. 

We assess how well services and partnerships self-evaluate and learn from adverse events to improve children’s experiences and outcomes.

Information about inspections for young people

Following some feedback we had from young people, we have created posters that explain what inspections are. You can download our poster for residential child care or our poster for foster care and display this in your service to help young people understand what inspections are and how they can get involved.

The Promise in action animation 

Our new animation co-designed with our young inspection volunteers demonstrates The Promise in action – by making sure that our young people’s voices authentically influence our work. 

Text to complain

Our young inspection volunteers

We work with 15 young inspection volunteers (aged between 18-26 years old) who visit children and young people’s services with us when we inspect.

Our young inspection volunteers talk with children and young people who use services and listen to their views. They meet managers to find out how well they involve children and young people to develop and improve services and they hear how well partnerships are fulfilling their responsibilities and duties as corporate parents.

If you would like to find out more about becoming a young inspection volunteer click here.

Click here to see some of the videos they have done for our joint inspections.

Our quality frameworks

Our quality frameworks support care services to self-evaluate. Our inspectors also use these when they inspect and look at the quality of care provided by services. 

Our children and young people’s inspection teams began using key question 7 in April 2022. As part of everyone's journey to meet the Promise, we reviewed key question 7 with inspectors, young people who experience or have experienced care and providers to evaluate the impact it was having and how well it was supporting the sector to self-evaluate its own performance. We made some changes as a result of this review and agreed that we will continue to use key question 7 for inspections from April 2024 onwards. We have also published new self-evaluation toolkits to support the sector. To support the launch we delivered webinars for care homes for children and young people and schoolcare accommodation and mainstream boarding schools and school hostels.

You can access the new KQ7 documents, full quality frameworks, and toolkits on The Hub here.

In April 2024 we held a live, online, briefing for providers, managers and external managers of registered services for children and young people. During the webinar we shared some overarching messages for the sector, on developments and practice themes identified throughout the previous inspection year; our methodology for the coming inspection year; and the increasing focus on young people’s voice and participation. You can watch the recording of the webinar here.

Care homes

• We have published Care Homes for Children and Young People - The Design Guide to support applicants and providers with design, planning and construction considerations for new or converted care homes for children and young people.
• We spoke to children about what was important to them in care home design, and included quotes from young people in the guidance.
• To support with emergency situations, we have published Guidance for providers of care homes for children and young people on the emergency relaxation of conditions of numbers.

Secure services

• The Secure Care Pathway and Standards Scotland were created to improve the experiences of children and young people who are in, or on the edges of, secure care, leading to better and brighter outcomes.
• We have published a Protocol and procedures for secure accommodation services on the use of registered emergency beds.

School care accommodation services

The Registrar of Independent Schools, the Care Inspectorate and Education Scotland have worked together to produce Guidance on effective safeguarding for boards of governors in independent schools, to assist with self-evaluation and monitoring of child protection and safeguarding practices.

To set out our approach to regulating guardianship arrangements in boarding schools we have published Guidance for the regulation of guardianship arrangements in boarding schools.

Supporting unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC)

We understand that meeting the needs of asylum-seeking and refugee children and young people across Scotland is very challenging and we believe that we all need to work together, to make any improvements that are needed. To help inform this work we hosted a webinar, with input from COSLA, Scottish Guardianship Service, and the Scottish Refugee Council. The webinar covered:

• the background to UASC policy and the National Transfer Scheme
• information about what support and services are available
• the context around why young people are arriving to Scotland, and what their lived experiences have been
• an opportunity to explore any queries or concerns, and share examples of best practice.

The content is relevant for local authorities, social workers, residential childcare staff, fostering services, and foster carers. You can watch the recording of the webinar here.

To better support how we engage with children and young people who have English as a second or foreign language, we have developed this poster for services to display. It’s designed to let young people know that we are happy to book an interpreter to chat with them.

Restrictive practices

• We understand that the use of restrictive practices in the promotion of rights, independence and choice for children and young people conflicts with promoting and maintaining a duty of care by taking protective action to keep young people safe.
• We are a member of Restraint Reduction Scotland, and have worked collaboratively with the Scottish Physical Restraint Action Group (SPRAG) to develop a Self-evaluation tool: The use of restrictive practices. It is designed to support services to evaluate how well they are doing in using restrictive practices and identify areas where they want to improve.
• To support the launch of the self-evaluation tool, we held two webinars; a recording of the webinars combined can be found here.

Depriving and restricting liberty for children and young people

We recognise that services are treading a delicate balance between taking necessary action to keep children and young people safe, whilst not unnecessarily restricting liberty.  Our new position paper aims to set out our attitude, expectation, and actions around the restriction and deprivation of liberty in care home, school care and secure accommodation services.  This includes circumstances where children and young people may be deprived of their liberty, where their liberty is restricted, or where this is a risk through environmental design and/or care practices. You can see the paper here.

Children and young people placed cross border and at a distance from home

Distance placements refer to any child who has been placed in a care setting outside of their home community. You can read our report on ‘Distance placements: exploration of practice, outcomes, and children’s rights’ here.

In January 2022 we carried out a short thematic review of children and young people placed cross border on Deprivation of Liberty Orders. We spoke to nine of the children face to face, and had a telephone interview with one young person. You can read the report about this here.

Admissions

In aspiring to make residential care a positive choice for all children in Scotland who require it, and to promote best practice in admissions and matching, we published Matching Looked After Children and Young People: Admissions Guidance for Residential Services.

Care planning

To support staff in services to develop personal plans for children and young people we developed a Guide for providers on personal planning: children and young people. We spoke with young people to gather their views, and included quotes from young people throughout the document.

Records and notification reporting

By law all services must keep certain records, and tell us if particular events take place. You can read our Records that all registered children and young people’s care services must keep and guidance on notification reporting here.

Staffing

To support providers to ensure they are appropriately assessing and providing staffing levels to meet the needs of young people in their care, we published Guidance for providers on the assessment of staffing levels.

Corporate parenting

As a corporate parent, we carry out many of the roles any parent should.

We work with other corporate parents to promote the wellbeing of all children and young people and keep them safe from harm. We work hard to enable children and young people to have as much of a say as possible.

Read our corporate parenting plan 2021-23.

We have developed Guidance for children and young people’s services on the inclusion of transgender including non-binary young people. This is in response to a number of services who approached us looking for advice on how best to support transgender including non-binary young people. The guidance is based on current good practice and includes real practice examples from the sector.

Stand Up For Siblings

We are a proud member of the Stand Up For Siblings partnership, a Scotland wide initiative to improve and change legislation, policy and practice.  It’s about making sure children and young people live with their brothers and sisters, where it is appropriate to do so, and sustain strong and positive lifelong relationships with them. Read the Staying together and connected: getting it right for sisters and brothers: national practice guidance.

Our young inspection volunteers made a big contribution to this award-winning work and made a film about promoting and supporting sibling relationships for children and young people who experience care. Watch the film here. 

The Promise

We continue to work to deliver our organisation's contribution to keeping The Promise for children and young people. The Promise is about providing more intensive, preventative support to families so they can stay together where it is safe to do so.

Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry

We work with the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry to investigate the abuse of children in care in Scotland.

Continuing care

We have been supporting the Staying Put agenda since 2013 and our role as corporate parents under the Children and Young people (Scotland) Act 2014 includes supporting young people moving from care to adulthood and independence.

Read our Guidance for services on the provision of continuing care, the Continuing Care and the Welfare Assessment: Practice Note and watch the Continuing Care and the Welfare Assessment Webinar Recording.

We were involved in Continuing Care and Your Rights, a project co-created with care experienced young people, CELCIS, and Clan Childlaw. Continuing Care and Your Rights provides accessible information for young people on their right to continuing care.

Continuing improvement

We have created a video to help you learn how to run your own improvement projects using the Model for Improvement and ‘Plan Do Study Act’ (PDSA) cycles. This will also be helpful to both services and providers when progressing areas for improvement made as a result of inspection.

The video includes specific examples relating to children and young people. 

The Health and Social Care Standards

Under the Health and Social Care Standards, everyone is entitled to high-quality care and support tailored towards their needs and choices. That is why the Standards focus on the experience of people using services and supporting their outcomes.

The Standards apply to the NHS, as well as services registered with the Care Inspectorate and Healthcare Improvement Scotland. We use the Health and Social Care Standards to make sure services respect and meet people’s rights, needs and choices.

Download your copy of the Standards.

Equality and diversity

We believe that people in Scotland should experience a better quality of life as a result of accessible, excellent services that are designed and delivered to reflect their individual needs and promote their rights.

Our work focuses on people’s rights, choices and individual outcomes, the things that matter most to people. We continue to put equality and diversity at the heart of all we do. That’s why we made equality and diversity a key principle of our equality, diversity and inclusion strategy.

Inspection during Covid-19

Covid-19 inspection safety precautions for early learning and childcare services including childminders (Added 29 April 2021)

We are committed to carrying out our inspections safely, and we take our responsibility to the welfare of children and staff in your service very seriously.  We have worked with Public Health Scotland to ensure our inspection process is as safe as it possibly can be. 

All our staff have had infection prevention and control training that includes minimising the risk of contact and the safe use of personal protective equipment (PPE).  Our inspectors are undertaking twice weekly testing and are required to have a negative lateral flow test before visiting a service. If the test is positive, they self-isolate and arrange to undertake a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test.   No inspector will visit a service if they have any of the recognised symptoms of Covid-19.

We have amended our processes to minimise the time we need to spend in your service carrying out key tasks.  We will carry out some activities remotely, such as interviews with staff or parents.

When our inspectors are in your service, they will maintain physical distancing from your staff and each other and wear moisture resistance face masks.  You may see your inspector change these across the time they are in your service.  They will wash their hands regularly and carry supplies of hand sanitiser where hand washing may be more difficult, such as in outdoor areas.

Inspectors will limit the items they bring into your service and will use their tablets to record and photograph information rather than taking paper copies.

Inspections of services for children and young people (except childminders) (Added 27 April 2021)

We suspended our normal inspection programme in March 2020 in response to Scottish Government national restrictions on movement put in place to help suppress the spread of Covid-19. We maintained close contact with services across the country, providing advice and guidance to help providers continue to deliver services through a time of unprecedented challenge.

During the autumn and winter we recommenced our inspection programme on a revised basis. We carried out as much activity as possible remotely, using digital and other means. We undertook assurance activity to respond proportionately to any concerns and continued to make visits to services wherever we judged it was necessary to gain assurance about children’s wellbeing.

We have now revised our inspection priorities for 2021-22. They will be determined taking into account a number of factors including:

• intelligence which gives us cause for concern or suggests there are areas requiring further exploration. Intelligence may come from notifications or from a failure to comply with the notification system, and from complaints or relevant information provided by other bodies;
• inspection history, particularly where the last inspection identified significant areas for improvement and where we now need to assess the extent to which improvements have been made;
• services which have not been inspected since registration with the Care Inspectorate;
• inspection frequency timescales.

For all high and medium risk services, we aim to carry out on-site visits to engage in fieldwork, gain assurance about the wellbeing of children and young people and assess how their needs are being met. We will work sensitively with services to ensure this is done safely, in a way which reduces risks for everyone. Inspection feedback will continue to be provided through a virtual meeting.

For all other services, we will continue to carry out as much activity as possible remotely, using digital and other means. We are asking services for continued cooperation and support in providing documentary evidence timeously and facilitating conversations between inspectors and children, families, staff and other stakeholders. This helps us to complete inspections without undue delays.  We will continue to make visits to services wherever we judge it is necessary to gain assurance about children’s wellbeing.

All of our inspectors have received Covid training to help keep everyone in the service and themselves as safe as possible. They undertake regular lateral flow tests and make appropriate use of PPE and face masks.

We will be flexible and will amend plans as necessary in the light of changing circumstances locally and nationally.

Operating an early learning and childcare setting (including out of school care and childminders) during Covid-19 (Updated 12 August 2020)

We have developed ‘Key Question 5’, a self-evaluation resource and tool which asks you to evaluate how well you are supporting children and families during Covid-19. The aim of this resource is to enable settings to gather information and continually evaluate their progress in supporting staff, children and families to have confidence in the provision of ELC by specifically evidencing how they have implemented the national guidance for Covid-19, while ensuring positive outcomes for children. This is the only Key Question we expect ELC providers (including out of school care and childminders) to compete. This key question will sit alongside our Quality Framework for Early Learning and Childcare when this is published later this year (which will include Key Questions 1-4).

We encourage you to complete the ‘self-evaluation tool’. The tool asks you to take account of performance data when evaluating your service.  This will be individual to your service.  It may include how you communicate with families or other settings where there are blended placements. It may also be some examples of evidence which you wish to include within the tool e.g. Supporting evidence of how you have implemented and reviewed the national guidance relevant to your service:

• Guidance for early learning and childcare services
• Guidance for childminding services
• Guidance for school age childcare services
• Guidance for fully outdoor childcare services

Inspectors will request the completed self-evaluation from providers on a risk and sampling basis. Please do not send this to us until requested. This will not be before 10 August 2020.  However, we may undertake other scrutiny activities in settings before this date. Read more about this here. 

Covid-19 Scrutiny Assessment Tool (SAT) (Added 30 July 2020)

The Covid-19 Scrutiny Assessment Tool (SAT) is a trigger tool developed by the Care Inspectorate to identify indicators of potential concerns in care homes.

From 14 August this will replace the current Risk Assessment Rating (RAD) for all Care Homes (Adults, Older People, Children and Young People). Inspectors will begin this process from 30 July.

A list of questions that the inspectors will answer when completing the SAT in the RMS system can be found here.

This is for service provider’s information only.

The SAT is not a risk assessment in the same way that the RAD was but will support us to identify what level of support and scrutiny is appropriate for a service taking account their current circumstances.

In developing the Covid-19 SAT we considered specific information relevant to the current Covid-19 pandemic. It is based on what our intelligence has so far identified as being key indicators or concerns within services to allow us to consider where additional support and/or scrutiny may be required. 

The Covid-19 SAT is based on a Scrutiny Assessment Tool we have developed and tested that included information from our enforcement review.  The release of the new tool was delayed due to the pandemic, we are planning to release the full SAT for all service types later in the year. 

Key question 7 for children and young people residential services (Added 6 July 2020)

We have developed key question 7 for children and young people residential services.

Where there are concerns relating to Covid-19 in a residential childcare setting this key question is to be used as part of our scrutiny.

Where there are concerns not relating to Covid-19, areas from the existing quality framework will be used as a basis of our scrutiny work.

New key question for care home inspections (Added 10 June 2020) 

In order to robustly assess care home arrangements to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, our inspections are placing particular focus on infection prevention and control, personal protective equipment and staffing in care settings. 

We have developed Key Question 7 to augment  our quality framework for care homes for older people and our quality framework for care homes for adults.  We have done this to meet the duties placed on us by the Coronavirus (Scotland) (No. 2) Act and subsequent guidance that we must evaluate (grade) infection prevention and control and staffing.  

This means we will carry out targeted inspections that are short, focused and carried out with colleagues from Health Improvement Scotland and Health Protection Scotland, to assess care and support for people experiencing care and support during the Covid-19 pandemic. We will continue to put the wellbeing for people experiencing care at the heart of our inspections.  

The Guide - resources and documents

The Guide provides information for community planning partnerships (CPP) about the process for the joint inspection of services for children and young people at risk of harm.  This includes services for children under the age of 18 years, at the time of their involvement with services. It should be read in conjunction with the quality framework for children and young people in need of care and protection (QIF).

This section is the single repository for documents associated with inspection activity. This not only allows partnerships preparing for an inspection to access these documents below when they need them, but also enables others to potentially make use of them when planning their own improvement activities. If partnerships being inspected have any queries about any part of The Guide they should consult with their inspection lead, or with their link inspector if not being currently inspected.

• Introduction
• Key terms

The Guide - introduction

A. Background

The Guide is aimed at community planning partners (CPP) and staff participating in joint inspections.  It is complementary to a quality framework for children and young people in need of care and protection (QIF) which supports joint self-evaluation and continuous improvement.

Joint inspections include representatives from Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS), Education Scotland (ES) and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS), as well as young inspection volunteers.  They take account of the full range of work within a CPP area including services provided by social workers, health visitors, police officers, teachers and the third sector.

Whilst details of the approach to each joint inspection may vary in response to local circumstances, the core elements of the process remain consistent and comparable.

Embedded in our approach is a strong emphasis on listening to, and taking account of, the views of children and young people as well as their parents and carers.  The young inspection volunteers, who have relevant experience of services and are trained and supported to be members of joint inspection teams, play a key role in this.  These inspections provide public assurance on the quality and effectiveness of services for children and young people and seek to assist partnerships in continuous improvement.

The methodology for joint inspections, as well as our quality framework, is informed by the European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model. It looks at:

• key outcomes
• stakeholder’s needs
• delivery of services
• management
• leadership
• capacity for improvement.

Our quality framework outlined in the diagram below contains 22 quality indicators.

B. Joint inspection focus

Since July 2021, the remit of the joint inspections is to consider the effectiveness of services for children and young people at risk of harm.  The inspections take account of the difference community planning partnerships are making to the lives of children and young people at risk of harm.

Looking ahead to the implementation of The Promise and the changes that will be required in both practice and scrutiny, the intention of these inspections is to achieve assurance about how children and young people at risk of harm are being kept safe.  We are keen to establish how well protection processes to identify, assess and plan for the management of risk are enabling children and young people to experience sustained loving and nurturing relationships, to keep them safe from further harm and promote their wellbeing.

Evidence gathered under the quality indicators of our quality framework for children and young people in need of care and protection (QIF) will enable inspectors to address the four following aims:

• Children and young people are safer because risks have been identified early and responded to effectively.
• Children and young people’s lives improve with high quality planning and support, ensuring they experience sustained loving and nurturing relationships to keep them safe from further harm.  
• Children, young people, and families are meaningfully and appropriately involved in decisions about their lives. They influence service planning, delivery and improvement.
• Collaborative strategic leadership, planning and operational management ensure high standards of service delivery.

These will, in turn, form the basis of the published report, which will include key messages, strengths and areas for development for the partnership.

In addition, we will evaluate Indicator 2.1 (Impact on children and young people) using the six point scale.

C. Joint inspection process

During the inspection it is important that we hear as much as possible from children and young people using services.  Consequently, we have developed our methodology to enable their views to be prominent.  We have produced a survey specifically to hear feedback from children and young people, as well as a separate survey for parents and carers.

We want to hear about how children and young people are involved in all the stages of protection process and the impact that this has had.  We are interested to see how children and young people are enabled to take part in discussions about service delivery and improvement and how partners respond to their views.  We want to know about information sharing and complaints processes and will be seeking assurance that these are accessible and actively promoted.  We will be looking at how partners comply with the broader remit of the UNCRC and their response to children’s rights issues.

We will work closely with trained young inspection volunteers who themselves have had experience of services for children and young people.  They will lead much of our direct contact with children and young people during the inspection.

We are particularly keen to hear the views of children and young people about:

• Their personal well-being and outcomes.  Perceived well-being is increasingly viewed as the most important element of feedback from service users and can be used for: identifying the needs of groups; evaluating the impact of a specific intervention; or obtaining a snapshot of needs and strengths in communities.

• The staff working with them and their families.  We know the importance of children and young people being enabled to experience sincere human contact and enduring relationships. We will therefore explore the extent to which they have confidence in the people who support and care for them.

• Their experiences of the processes that they have encountered – assessment, planning, intervention, review.  We are interested in the experience that children and young people have of the processes which are designed to recognise and respond to child protection concerns and keep them safe and well.

• How well services have involved them.  We are not only interested in the headline care standard “I am involved in all decisions about my care and support”, but also in the ways that services are involving children and young people in reviewing and improving the work that they do.  We want to know how services have sought their views and hear how these views have been used to make changes as necessary.

• Key terms
• Resources and documents