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.

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 are supported to live at home within their families 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, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Education, 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 six local authority areas in 2025/2026 in which to conduct our joint inspections.
• The joint inspections will take a multi agency 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. We will report on the extent to which the relevant rights of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child are central to decision making in supporting these children and young people. Participation of children, young people and families is 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 information and data gathering; a literature review; meetings with children and young people and families and focus groups with staff; reading the records of children and young people and surveys for children, young people, families and staff.

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:

• Direction – clarity of purpose and strategy to achieve aims
• Execution – implementation of the strategy through delivery
• Results – what results have been achieved

Our approach to reporting

We will publish one written report following each joint inspection. The report will be specific and tailored and will complement and build on the meetings and feedback discussions inspectors hold with partnerships during the inspection. We will also develop accessible reporting specific to children and young people, following consultation with our young inspection volunteers.

In our report we will consider the three key areas outlined below. We will evaluate three quality indicators on our six point scale. These are:

• Quality indicator 2.1: Impact on children and young people
• Quality indicator 5.3: Care planning, managing risk and effective intervention
• Quality indicator 9.2: Leadership of strategy and direction

Resources

Our resources pages provide information for community planning partnerships (CPP) about the process for the joint inspection of services for children and young people. 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.

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 will:

• 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.

We have surveys for children, young people and families and we use and safeguard the data gathered from these in the same way as we do with what you tell us in person. Our approach to participation during inspection reflects the importance we give to hearing from children and young people. We also have a staff survey which also enables us to maximise the feedback we get from those working across services in all roles.

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.

Read more about the way we are approaching these joint inspections and the methods we will be using.

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.

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.

Community justice partnerships: supported and validated self-evaluation

Between 2018 and 2020, we worked in partnership with His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland (HMICS) to support the implementation of the national community justice model through a validated self-evaluation approach. We carried out assurance activities across the following five community justice partnerships, one of which incorporated three local authority areas:

• North Lanarkshire (did not involve HMICS)
• Clackmannanshire
• Ayrshire (North, South and East)
• Shetland
• East Lothian

In summary our activities included:

• support and guidance from a strategic inspector for partnership areas to undertake self-evaluation
• submission of a self-evaluation by the partnership
• analysis of the submitted documents by the Care Inspectorate/HMICS team
• follow-up activities with the partnership to explore any areas of uncertainty (these included visits, interviews and focus groups)
• verbal feedback on the findings to each partnership based on the analysis of all the evidence gathered
• publication of the validation letter.