How you can get involved if you have experience of using services
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. Information for children, young people and parents.
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, Education Scotland, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary Scotland and Health Improvement Scotland will:
- speak with the staff
- speak with children and young people and listen to their views
- speak with parents
- 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.
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.
Joint inspections of services for children and young people at risk of harm
At the request of Scottish Ministers, between 2021 and 2025 the Care Inspectorate led on joint inspections of services for children and young people at risk of harm.
The remit of these joint inspections was to consider the effectiveness of services for children and young people up to the age of 18 at risk of harm. The inspections looked at the differences community planning partnerships are making to the lives of children and young people at risk of harm and their families.
These joint inspections aimed to provide assurance on the extent to which services, working together, could demonstrate that:
- 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 and 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.
We will shortly be producing an overview report. You can access individual inspection reports here.
Children and young people subject to compulsory supervision orders
Joint inspection of services for children and young people subject to compulsory supervision orders living at home with their parents
In August 2025 we started working with our scrutiny partners to take a more focused look at the experiences and outcomes of children and young people subject to compulsory supervision orders and living at home with parents. On the 8 July 2025 we hosted a webinar to share our plans. We will complete up to four inspections with this focus by April 2026.
More information:
- Information for children, young people and parents
- Information for staff
- Information for inspection coordinators
- Background information
Public protection
Public protection - enhancing our culture of learning through independent scrutiny and inspection
The scrutiny, inspection, assurance and regulatory advisory group is aligned with the national public protection leadership group. It is chaired by Craig Naylor, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary in Scotland. It brings together independent scrutiny bodies in response to “Priority 2 - enhancing our culture of learning through independent scrutiny and inspection” of the leadership group’s workplan. The advisory group is independent and is not a subgroup of the leadership group and the relationship between the two groups is best described as a critical friendship.
The work of the advisory group is supported by the public protection scrutiny working group which brings together inspectors and representatives from scrutiny bodies, and other relevant agencies, to develop proposals to deliver effective and proportionate scrutiny of public protection and coordinate engagement with stakeholders.
What is within the scope of public protection?
Public protection has six strands as described in the Chief Officers Public Protection Induction Resource and the national public protection leadership group terms of reference. These are:
- child protection
- adult support and protection
- violence against women and girls
- alcohol and drugs
- multi-agency public protection arrangements (MAPPA)
- suicide prevention.
Principles
The working group has adopted a range of principles to make sure that scrutiny assurance of public protection will be:
- designed to support improvement
- mindful of minimising additional demands on partnerships - building on partnerships’ existing learning and improvement self-evaluation activities
- proportionate - based on risk and intelligence
- appreciative - focused on what works well
- collaborative - scrutiny bodies, working together with partnerships and people with lived experience
- innovative and make the best use of technology
- transparent and open.
Timescales
Phase 1 of the work has begun with a series of conversations over the summer to engage Chief Officers Groups (COGs) across the country. This reflects their key role in assuring public protection arrangements.
We are keen to get COGs’ views, advice and support to help us refine our thinking on:
- how scrutiny bodies can work with local partnerships and each other to improve assurance of public protection and outcomes for people of all ages.
- where COGs are confident that public protection is working well and why. This will include particular strands, such as child protection. It will also include crosscutting aspects such as communication and quality assurance/self-evaluation.
- where there are challenges and opportunities to improve. This will include where there have been successful improvements and where improvement remains more challenging.
Learning from this and engaging with wider stakeholders will inform the development of a future public protection methodology, which will commence in 2026.
More information
Further updates will be provided periodically on this webpage as the work progresses. For more information 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.
Information for inspection coordinators
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.
Timeline
The principles of joint inspection
Our approach and framework
Reporting
Other helpful documents
Timeline
Preparation (weeks 1-4)
- Week 1 - notification
- Week 2 - meet coordinator and participation lead
- Week 3 - submission of pre-inspection return
- Week 4 - submission of document return
- Week 4 - arrange and open surveys
Gather and analyse evidence (weeks 5-10)
- Week 5 - professional discussion 1
- Weeks 4-8 - children and young people, and parents and carers' surveys
- Weeks 4-7 - staff survey
- Week 6 - inspection team analyse written evidence
- Week 8 - review of childrens records
Onsite acticity and final analysis (weeks 11-14)
- Week 11 - professional discussion 2
- Week 12 - onsite engagement with staff, children, young people and famileis
- Week 13 - inspection team final anaysis
Reporting and publication (weeks 15-21)
- Week 15 - professional discussion 3
- Week 17 - quality anad consistency panel
- Week 17 - partnership recieve first draft of report
- Week 20 - partnership receives embargoed report
- Week 21 - report publication and video publication
- After week 21 - post-inspection follow up
The principles of joint inspection
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:
Direction – clarity of purpose and strategy to achieve aims
Execution – implementation of the strategy through delivery
Results – what results have been achieved
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 these three key lines of enquiry.
Children and young people are well supported to live with their families. This support helps to keep them safe, overcome difficulties and makes a positive difference in their lives.
The services children and young people receive are well planned and delivered in a way which is compassionate and by staff who put children and young people at the heart of decision-making. People in the workforce ensure that children, young people and parents are meaningfully listened to, heard and included.
Leaders and managers work well together to create and maintain a joined-up system of care which delivers the right services to each child at the right time. This provides children and young people, their parents and the workforce with help, support and accountability.
We will evaluate four 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 5.4: Involving individual children, young people and families
- Quality indicator 9.2: Leadership of strategy and direction
Other helpful documents
The activities we will undertake
During the inspection, a team of inspectors from the Care Inspectorate, Education Scotland, HM Inspectorate of Constabulary Scotland and Health Improvement Scotland 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.
Surveys – 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.
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.