Social Work Inspection Agency
The newly established Social Work Inspection Agency ( SWIA) is undertaking performance inspections of all Scotland's local authority social work services. Each inspection focuses on the approach to continuous improvement of the local authority.
In 2005, SWIA undertook three pilot inspections, in Angus, Fife, and South Lanarkshire. It will use the three pilot inspections to inform the roll-out of full performance inspections across Scotland in 2006-08, for example by providing benchmarks for future evaluations.
SWIA will monitor the implementation of the recommendations made in this report and will undertake a short follow-up inspection one year after the publication of the report.
SWIA has adopted a six-point scale in its inspection of local authority social work services. In this report the inspection team has provided an evaluation in relation to each of the ten areas forevaluation of the performance inspection model ( PIM), as set out in appendix 3. The six-point scale is set out below.
The evaluation scale
Level | Definition | Description |
|---|
Level 6 | Excellent | Excellent or outstanding |
Level 5 | Very good | Major strengths |
Level 4 | Good | Important strengths with some areas for improvement |
Level 3 | Adequate | Strengths just outweigh weaknesses |
Level 2 | Weak | Important weaknesses |
Level 1 | Unsatisfactory | Major weaknesses |
The report also uses the following words to describe numbers and proportions:
almost all | over 90% |
most | 75-90% |
majority | 50-74% |
less than half | 15-49% |
few | up to 15% |
Examples of good practice in Fife are set out in boxes throughout the text