Our support to local partnerships

Each strategic inspector acts as link inspector to one or more local authority areas across the country. The key purpose of the link inspector role is to fulfil the Care Inspectorate’s ‘general duty of furthering improvement in the quality of social services’ in relation to local authority social work services. This duty is set out at section 44(1)(b) of the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010.

The link inspector role has a degree of complexity because few social work services are now provided on a standalone basis. Most are now planned, delivered and monitored through partnership arrangements. Regardless of their specialist area, link inspectors engage across the broad spectrum of social work and care services for adults and older people, children and young people and justice services in their link areas.

The key areas of activity for link inspector work are:

• monitoring the performance and quality of social work services

• monitoring the performance of partnership public protection arrangements

• identifying factors which are supporting social work services to deliver good or improved outcomes, and any barriers

• highlighting risks to the delivery of positive outcomes by social work services, and the potential impact of those risks

• identifying good practice within social work service and disseminating this more widely

• supporting the efforts of local authorities and partnerships to build capacity for continuous improvement.

We also provides relationship managers for each council area, with responsibility for assurance and improvement work in relation to regulated services. There is a relationship manager for adult services and one for ELC. The link inspector and relationship managers work closely together.

You can get information about the link inspector for a particular local authority area by emailing the strategic support team.

Information about the relationship manager role

We provide a designated link team for local authorities and strategic partnerships. This is because there are multiple services of different types and a need for regular planned contact to discuss emerging issues across the breadth of their work.  Link teams consist of a strategic inspector, who is responsible for scrutiny carried out at authority or strategic partnership level; a relationship manager for adult care services and complaints about care services; and a relationship manager for children’s care services and registration.  

Relationship managers also provide a designated point of contact for larger providers who operate multiple services.  

Managers responsible for services for children also link to each of the six regional collaboratives that have now been established across the country.