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.