• Find a children and families services inspection report
• Understanding a children and families services inspection report
• Types of children and families services Ofsted inspects
• Inspecting children and families services
  • Inspecting children's social care
  • Inspecting Cafcass
  • Inspecting children's centres
  • Inspecting and assessing local authority children's services
• Types of children and families services Ofsted regulates
• Regulating children and families services
• Statistics for children and families services
• About our survey reports
• How to complain

Inspecting children's social care

Before an inspection

We will use the information we hold about the service to plan our inspection.

We will send some children and young people a survey form to see what they think of the service; we then decide which experiences to use as a representative sample that we will look into further.

There are preparations providers should make before an inspection.

During an inspection

Inspectors spend time on various tasks depending on the type of service. For example, when we inspect fostering services inspectors will want to see the fostered children and young people, but usually they will not see the place where they are living.

The inspector and the provider meet and talk about the outcome of the inspection.

After an inspection

We publish a report. The report says how well the service is working for the people who use it and what, if any, improvements the service needs to make.

We make a judgement on how well the service is performing.

Outstanding: this aspect of the provision is of exceptionally high quality

Good: this aspect of the provision is strong

Satisfactory: this aspect of the provision is sound

Inadequate: this aspect of the provision is not good enough.

In some inspections the law says we can insist on changes; if things don't improve – for example, if people are not being looked after properly – we can close down a service. If we decide that the quality of care is inadequate, we give prompt feedback about what needs to be done to quickly improve the service. This involves our compliance and enforcement team; we will tell the service of the team’s decision and any further action that we will take.