Our role in quality assurance
The Care Inspectorate, on behalf of the Scottish Government, acts as a central repository for all learning reviews carried out by child protection, adult protection and public protection committees in Scotland.
As part of our general duty of furthering improvement in the quality of social services, we are responsible for reviewing the effectiveness of the processes for each learning review and providing observations to individual chief officer groups and protection committees. This forms part of our improvement remit. The key aim in relation to learning reviews is to assist the sector in its continual development and improvement of the learning review approach.
National guidance for adult protection committees undertaking learning reviews was published in May 2022. The revised national guidance for child protection committees for undertaking learning reviews was published in 2024. Both guidance documents make it clear that adult and child protection committees must inform us of two things. First, their decision on whether they will proceed with a learning review, and if not, the reasons for that decision. Second, the outcome of the learning review, including an anonymised copy of the review report.
For all situations considered under learning review guidance, a decision notification form should be completed. This electronic notification form should be completed at the point when a decision has been made whether to conduct a learning review, or to detail the reasons for not doing so. Committees are required to notify us of their decision to proceed, or not to proceed, to learning review using the learning review notification forms below.
In circumstances where protection committees agree to carry out an alternative review approach for learning they should submit anonymised completed reports or minutes that record learning and recommendations to us via secure e-mail to cistrategicteamnotification@careinspectorate.gov.scot. This will enable us to use the learning from these alternative approaches to inform the content of annual national overview reports. We will not provide observations to partnerships on these types of submissions.
Submission of learning review reports
Please submit the full learning review report via secure email to our strategic team. Any queries can also be directed to this address.
Quality markers
We provide observations on the learning review process, using the national guidance for child and adult protection committees undertaking learning reviews and the quality markers from the Learning into Practice Project which can be found here. To support our observations, we take a proportionate approach to the use of these markers within the Scottish context. However, they may be useful to committees in planning a review.