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 childcare 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 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.
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. We partner with Move On to help us recruit and support our young inspection volunteers
Watch some of the videos our young inspection volunteers 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 all the frameworks for children’s and young people’s services in our library.
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.
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