About us

How we are organised

We work in four teams: adults, children, justice and protection.

Each team is led by a service manager and we report through two chief inspectors to the Executive Director of Scrutiny and Assurance.

We are supported by a team of strategic support officers who provide support and co-ordination to all our scrutiny activities.

What we do

These are the core functions of the strategic inspection team.

1. Carrying out strategic inspection work.
2. Quality assurance functions – monitoring the completion and quality of:

• Learning reviews (significant case reviews) in relation to children and adults.
• Serious incident reviews (SIRs) in relation to people on community payback orders, drug treatment and testing orders and people supervised on release from prison.
• Investigations into the deaths of looked after children.

       3. Providing support to local authorities and partnerships through our link inspector role.

Who we work with

We know that outcomes for children and adults are affected by many factors.

Different services and organisations are involved in providing care and support to vulnerable children and adults and in most cases, social work services are planned and delivered in collaboration with partners.

We also understand that children and adults are all different, with a wide range of life circumstances and experiences.

For this reason, we do not carry out our scrutiny work in isolation but in partnership with children, adults and other organisations. This helps us to be confident that we are taking all relevant factors into account in our scrutiny work.

Inspection volunteers and people with lived experience

Wherever possible, we involve people with lived experience of using services, or of caring for someone who does, in our scrutiny work. We know that this keeps us grounded and often makes it easier for children and adults to share their experiences with us.

The Care Inspectorate has an involvement team that recruits and supports volunteers to work on inspections across our organisation, including strategic inspections. There is a specific team to support young people with experience of care services, between the ages of 18 and 26.

If you have lived experience of social work and social care services, or care for someone who does, and would like to know more about becoming involved in strategic inspections, please email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Associate assessors

Associate assessors are professionals from statutory and third sector organisations who work at a strategic level and have significant practice or management experience in services for children, adults or justice. They work as part of an inspection team for one inspection.

We believe that including associate assessors brings current practice perspectives to our strategic inspections. They can help ensure we are partnership-orientated and contribute to our understanding of the contemporary picture of service planning and delivery. At the same time, this involvement provides an ideal opportunity to help build capacity for joint self-evaluation and improvement in local partnerships.

Please check our frequently asked questions for more information. 

We are not currently recruiting associate assessors. However, if you are interested in becoming an associate assessor, please check our website which we will update when we are next recruiting. 

Our scrutiny partners

Many of the functions of planning, delivering and monitoring services for children and young people and adults and older people are carried out by more than one agency or organisation. For example, through community justice partnerships, children’s services partnerships and health and social care partnerships. So, we often collaborate with these other scrutiny bodies.

• Education Scotland

• Healthcare Improvement Scotland

• Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland

• Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons for Scotland

• Inspectorate of Prosecution in Scotland

• Audit Scotland

• Mental Welfare Commission

• Scottish Housing Regulator 

Annual returns

Each year, we ask service providers to complete an annual return to help us plan, inform and carry out our inspections and improvement work. 

We also publish a number of annual statistical publications and share some of the information with other organisations, such as the Scottish Social Services Council and the Scottish Government.

The intelligence we gather through annual returns helps us target our improvement activity and support within social care. It is a great source of baseline data across a variety of health and wellbeing indicators which we use to identify, drive and track improvement, for example infection control, nutrition and the recruitment and retention of staff.  The data also helps us to identify trends and topics by both geographical area or service type, so that we can see where best to focus our improvement support work, for example, improvement workshops or new resources and guidance for care services across the sector.

This year's annual returns will be made available to service providers for completion between 6 January and 2 March 2025. The closing date includes an extension of two weeks on our usual six-week deadline.

All service types must complete their annual returns electronically, using our eForms system. We would encourage services to check their eForms account to make sure that their email address is up to date to ensure they are notified when the annual returns go live.

Even inactive services must submit an annual return.

We no longer automatically downgrade services for failing to submit an annual return. This is because we do not believe that non-submission is necessarily a reflection of poor quality of service. We will, however, continue to publish details about submission or non-submission of annual returns within inspection reports. We also reserve the right to make a formal requirement relating to submission of an annual return, or in cases of serious or persistent non-compliance, to issue an improvement notice under s62 of the Public Services Reform (Scotland) Act 2010, requiring its submission.

Please note that where the manager of the service has changed, you must formally notify the Care Inspectorate of the correct details. This can be done using our online digital portal.  

Related documents

If you have any questions about the annual returns, please read our frequently asked questions.

Find out what has changed in the 2024 annual return. 

Archived updates

Bairns’ Hoose (Barnahus)

Bairns’ Hoose, based on an Icelandic model ‘Barnahus’, will bring together services in a ‘four rooms’ approach with child protection, health, justice and recovery services all made available in one setting.  Bairns’ Hoose aims to ensure that every child victim or witness has consistent and holistic support, access to specialist services and receives ongoing therapeutic care from services coordinated under one roof. 

The overall vision of a Bairns’ Hoose (Barnahus) in Scotland is that:

All children in Scotland who have been victims or witnesses to abuse or violence, as well as children under the age of criminal responsibility whose behaviour has caused significant harm or abuse, will have access to trauma informed recovery, support and justice.

The key values through which this vision will be achieved are that:

• we are child centered, trauma informed and respect the rights and wellbeing of the child at all times
• we provide consistent and holistic support, which enables children to have their voices heard, access specialist services and recover from their experiences
• we aim to prevent children being re-traumatised and to improve the experience of the criminal justice process for children and families, and
• we demonstrate connectedness and national leadership to uphold children’s rights to protection, support, participation and recovery.

In 2019, the Scottish Government commissioned Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the Care Inspectorate to jointly develop standards which will provide a blueprint for a Scottish Barnahus (Bairns’ Hoose).  Also in 2019, a Standards Development Group with representatives from across social work, police, health, justice and children’s voluntary organisations began developing the standards. In March 2020 Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the Care Inspectorate paused the development of the standards in order to reduce undue strain across the system and prioritise resources to support the national response to Covid-19. A refreshed Standards Development Group recommenced work on the Bairns’ Hoose standards in January 2022. 

The final standards are now available to download. We have also developed a version of the standards for children and young people. The standards will help to support a consistent national implementation of the Bairns’ Hoose model.

Update on Barnahus July 2023

For further information regarding the project, see other reports published to date:

• Consultation summary report
• Joint impact assessment
• Children’s rights and wellbeing impact assessment
• Bairns’ Hoose Standards: Phase 1 engagement pack
• Standards Scoping Report Bairns’ Hoose (Scottish Barnahus)
• The Foundations for Bairns’ Hoose (Scottish Barnahus)