Social Work Inspection Agency
Scottish Ministers established the social work inspection agency ( SWIA) in April 2005 to undertake performance inspections of all of Scotland's local authority social work services between 2005 and 2009. Each inspection focuses on the approach to continuous improvement of the local authority. SWIA will monitor the implementation of the recommendations made in this report and will undertake a short follow-up inspection one year after publication.
SWIA uses a six-point scale in its evaluation of local authority social work services. In this report the inspection team has provided an evaluation in relation to each of the ten areas for evaluation of the performance inspection model ( PIM), as outlined 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 |
This inspection report mainly uses the past tense - for example, '…there was a huge effort'. We state the position at the time of the inspection. This does not mean that the stated position is no longer the case. If something was happening at the time of our inspection, but is not happening now, we say so.
In the report, we use quotations from people only where they illustrate widely held perceptions. They are not the views of just one person. We use the following words to describe numbers and proportions when we quote findings from our surveys or from our file reading exercise:
almost all | over 90% |
most | 75-90% |
majority | 50-74% |
less than half | 15-49% |
few | up to 15% |