Care Inspectorate Wales launches new approach to sharing positive practice from local authority inspections
Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW) has begun collecting and sharing examples of Practice Worth Sharing identified through its local authority inspections, as part of its ongoing commitment to supporting improvement across children's and adults' services in Wales.
Through inspection activity, CIW inspectors regularly encounter examples of effective practice that go beyond routine expectations and demonstrate a clear, positive impact on outcomes for children, families and communities. This new initiative provides a way to capture that learning and share it more widely, helping other local authorities learn from and adapt approaches that are working well.
The first Practice Worth Sharing example to be published focuses on Neath Port Talbot Council's use of Most Significant Change (MSC), an approach that brings the lived experience of children, families and carers into the heart of learning and improvement.
During CIW's assurance check of children's services in Neath Port Talbot, inspectors found a strong strengths-based culture in which children, families and carers were listened to, and their views informed plans and decisions. Within this culture, MSC gave people a way to share their experiences of what had made the biggest difference to them, and why.
Lou Bushell-Bauers, Head of Local Authority Inspection at CIW said "Practice Worth Sharing is about capturing what we see working well through our inspections and using it to support learning right across the sector.
Neath Port Talbot's use of Most Significant Change is a good first example of this. It shows what can happen when an authority genuinely embeds the voices of children, families and carers into how it learns and improves. We hope this is the first of many examples that help local authorities learn from one another."