The Care Inspectorate, on behalf of the Scottish Government, acts as a central repository for all learning reviews carried out by child protection, adult protection and public protection committees in Scotland.  

As part of our general duty of furthering improvement in the quality of social services, the Care Inspectorate is responsible for reviewing the effectiveness of the processes for each learning review and providing observations to individual chief officer groups and protection committees. This forms part of the Care Inspectorate’s improvement remit. The key aim in relation to learning reviews is to assist the sector in its continual development and improvement of the learning review approach. 

National Guidance for Adult Protection Committees; Undertaking Learning Reviews was published in May 2022. The revised National Guidance for Child Protection Committees for Undertaking Learning Reviews was published in 2024. Both guidance documents clearly set out that adult and child protection committees should inform the Care Inspectorate of two things. Firstly, the decision about whether they are proceeding with a learning review and if not, the reasons for not doing so. Secondly, the outcome of the learning review, including an anonymised copy of the review report which should be sent to us.  

For all situations considered under learning review guidance, a decision notification form should be completed. This electronic notification form should be completed at the point when a decision has been made whether to conduct a learning review, or to detail the reasons for not doing so. Committees are required to notify the Care Inspectorate of their decision to proceed, or not to proceed, to learning review using the learning review notification forms below. 

Adult notifications

Child notifications

In circumstances where protection committees agree to carry out an alternative review approach for learning they should submit anonymised completed reports or minutes that record learning and recommendations to the Care Inspectorate via secure e-mail to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. This will enable the Care Inspectorate to use the learning from these alternative approaches to inform the content of annual national overview reports. The Care Inspectorate will not provide observations to partnerships on these types of submissions.  

Please submit the full learning review report via secure email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..  Any queries can also be directed to this address. 

Quality Markers

The Care Inspectorate provides observations on the learning review process, using the national guidance for child and adult protection committees undertaking learning reviews and the quality markers from the Learning into Practice Project which can be found here. To support our observations, we take a proportionate approach to the use of these markers within the Scottish context. However, they may be useful to committees in planning a review.