Our inspections

• Care home services -including those who provide care home services for children or adults
• Domiciliary support services - a service that can provide care in your own home as well as general support
• Residential family centre services
• Secure accommodation services
• Adult placement services
• Fostering services
• Adoption services
• Advocacy services
• Child minders
• Full day care
• Out of school care
• Day care services for under 12’s
• Boarding schools
• Residential special schools
• Further education colleges which accommodate students under 18

Code of Practice

We have developed separate Codes of Practice, which describe our approach to how we inspect services regulated under the Regulation and Inspection of Social Care (Wales) Act 2016 and the Children and Families Measure 2010. We have also developed a Code of Practice describing our approach to reviewing local authority social services functions in Wales through our performance evaluation and inspection activity. These Codes of Practice also set out the principles guiding our inspection work.

Inspection frameworks

To support a consistent approach to the inspection process, we have developed inspection frameworks that focus on outcomes which we use with our inspection activity.

Our inspectors will check the service being delivered in different ways. This may include:

• Talking and listening to people using the service
• Observing people using the service using the Short Observational Framework for Inspection (SOFI) framework
• Talking and listening to relatives of people using the service
• Talking and listening to members of staff
• Talking and listening to the manager and visiting professionals of the service
• Reading relevant policies and records
• Giving out questionnaires to people, professionals and relatives where appropriate
• Looking at and reporting if a service is provided in Welsh without someone having to ask for it. This is known as the ‘Active offer’

• The inspector may discuss their findings with the provider during or at the end of the inspection
• The inspector will send a post inspection feedback questionnaire with the provider on the day of the inspection
• The inspector will write up findings from their visit in an inspection report. The report will be sent to the provider within 25 working days after the inspection
• The registered person providing the service will have up to 10 working days to comment on the factual accuracy of the report. Amendments may be made in light of the comments we receive
• The report (apart from children’s homes) is then published on our directory.