Our children and young people’s inspection teams began using key question 7 in April 2022.  As part of everyone's journey to meet the Promise, we reviewed key question 7 with inspectors, young people who experience or have experienced care and providers to evaluate the impact it was having and how well it was supporting the sector to self-evaluate its own performance.  We have made some changes as a result of this review and agreed that we will continue to use key question 7 for inspections from April 2024 onwards.

We have provided some examples of what people told us and how we have used this to inform the development of key question 7.

You said We did
Overall, key question 7 was working well.  It was more proportionate and prioritised children and young people’s outcomes. We will continue to use key question 7 for inspections of relevant services in the 2024/25 inspection year. 
Although key question 7 was focused on outcomes, the Care Inspectorate still looked at processes and it was not always clear why this was the case.  The updated key question 7 documents will contain more context on why we look at some processes. We have included a list of our ‘core assurances’ in each of the documents. 
The quality illustrations would benefit from some changes that would help make them clearer for services and better reflect the journey experienced by children and young people.  We have amended some of our quality illustrations in the relevant key question 7. This incorporates points raised in our consultation and issues identified during our internal review as part of our commitments to meet the Promise.
Although key question 7 was helpful, further support was needed to help services with improvement and development activities. We will produce self-evaluation toolkits for services, which will link to the full framework as a means of supporting detailed self-evaluation. Each key question 7 document will also contain a link to a virtual improvement toolbox to help services access improvement resources.

The updated key question 7 documents are available on The Hub.  We have published these now so that services can familiarise themselves with the updated documents and we will begin to use them for inspections from 1 April 2024.  

To help managers, staff and providers understand the changes to key question 7, we will be holding webinars, which you can register for below.  

We will also be arranging engagement with secure accommodation services.