Reviewing school inspection

As Scotland’s inspectorate of education, we have a duty to uphold the rights of children and young people and to ensure the education system delivers what they need to thrive.

Why inspection matters

Our role is to shine a light on what works, share effective practice, and support improvement across the system. But we also recognise that for some children and young people, the system isn’t yet delivering as well as it should. When that happens, we have a duty to act. Inspection helps us understand what’s working well and where there’s room to grow. It’s not just about assurance; it’s about improvement. It’s about making education better, for every learner, in every school.

To do this well, our school inspection framework and model must be fit for purpose. They must achieve what we need it to and change where it doesn’t.

That’s why we’re carrying out a full review of school inspection.

An important part of the review is hearing from those directly affected by school inspections. This includes:

teachers
school staff
leaders and managers
parents and carers
children and young people

Between December 2024 and April 2025, we engaged with a range of stakeholders in different ways including:

meetings (in person and online)
an online questionnaire
email submissions

We asked stakeholders to consider and share their views on the following questions:

What are the principles on which a new schools framework should be developed? Are there any unintended consequences/challenges of the existing framework that need to be addressed? How might we overcome these?
What are the key features of effective inspection models that we should be considering? To what extent to existing models create unintended consequences, challenges or missed opportunities? How might these be overcome?

We have engaged with more than 1300 people and we have received over 160 responses to our online questionnaire.

The feedback received from all these different types of engagement will help shape the next steps in the review of school inspections.

Stakeholder Forum

We set up a new Stakeholder Forum as part of our school inspection review. The forum’s purpose is to:

share views to inform our thinking
provide advice and critical challenge to our work
discuss and address potential issues and solutions as they arise

The experiences, suggestions, and feedback from the forum members is invaluable. We will use these as we make decisions for the future of education inspections in Scotland.

Members

From January to April 2025 we held workshops and met with over 500 children and young people from different types of schools across the country.

We worked with groups of children and young people to develop workshop materials to help us gather feedback about some of the things that are most important to them.

We also met with a number of organisations that represent the views of children and young people and talked with some of the children and young people they represent.

We will consider the information gathered through these discussions with children and young people to inform and develop ideas around approaches to school inspections.

To hear from even more people, we launched a public consultation School inspections are changing: Shape What’s Next as part of our review of school inspections. The consultation closed on 26 November 2025.