For Scotland's childcare providers and children's homes, the regular inspection visits from the men and women with clipboards from the Care Commission are nothing new. However, the tables are about to be turned as the county's care regulator prepares to hand service providers clipboards of their own.

From this month, the commission will roll out a new inspection regime that puts services firmly in the driving seat. At the heart of the system will be a process of self-assessment, under which providers will be asked to grade themselves on how well they think they're doing in providing their services.

"We think this will act as an incentive for service providers to continue to improve care for children and young people," says Ronnie Hill, director of children's services regulation at the Care Commission. "The grading system is a much more explicit indicator of quality."

The new grading system, which has been developed over the last two years, has already been piloted by about 150 services ahead of the official launch this month. For Margaret McLaughlin, manager of Roneil Children's Unit in Paisley, one of the pilots, the experience has been a positive one, because it has given her the opportunity to demonstrate to the regulator that she is doing a good job.

McLaughlin says: "It's good because any children's unit would say, 'we're running a good service'. But are we really? My idea of good may be different from someone else's. So it's good for us to be able to grade ourselves to prove whether we're giving a good or really good service."

For managers such as McLaughlin, the prospect of a burdensome self-assessment procedure may seem an unappealing one, but Hill believes the new process is something providers genuinely want, and will eventually prove to be simpler and more effective than the one already in place. "We did a substantial review of our inspection processes with providers and users, and they told us this is the way they want to go," he says. "We're confident it's a much better system than the one we currently employ."

The new system, Hill explains, will involve each service awarding itself a mark in four separate areas: care and support; environment; staffing; and management and leadership. Under each theme, providers will be asked to make a number of "quality statements" summarising how they think they are performing.

Once these have been completed, providers will be able to give themselves a grade for each theme on a scale of one to six, with six being excellent. When the grades are submitted, they will be checked and verified by inspectors and, from July this year, published on the commission's website.

This may not sound like too onerous a process, but the key, Hill says, is that each statement is backed up by robust evidence. "We want to ensure a provider is engaging with people who use the services," he says. "They will also have to show us evidence they've worked with local authorities or other organisations that may have purchased services from them."

For providers involved in the pilots, gathering together evidence to justify grades has so far proved the most time-consuming part of the process. "There's been quite a bit of work that's needed to go into it," says Ann Robertson, manager of Trusty Ted, a nursery for the children of NHS employees in Grampian. "It's mainly involved background evidence on how we do things, and takes a while to get all the information together."

This is largely because of the breadth of evidence required, Robertson explains. The themes and quality statements in the self-assessment are linked to the national care standards, Scotland's principal benchmark for quality in care, which cover a broad range of indicators. "We had to provide information on things like the quality of experience we offer to the children, child protection, quality of the environment, play opportunities, how staff members engage with children and parents and how effective the management is."

All of which may sound like a lot to co-ordinate, but Robertson says now the information is all gathered in one place, it should make future inspections more straightforward. "The principle is that the information you put in at the beginning is then used next year, so there's an initial outlay of work, but then when we come to do it this year, we just need to amend it."

McLaughlin adds that the process has also identified areas where her service could improve. "One thing we found we didn't do well was including young people in every aspect of our service, such as getting them to help us with recruitment of staff. That shone through, and made me think about it all a bit more," she says.

Differences of opinion

But there are areas where perhaps the self-assessment process won't be so simple. One is the possible eventuality of a service giving itself a score that in no way reflects the job it is actually doing. How will the commission ensure the information it is getting from providers is accurate and honest?

"Regardless of how you grade yourself, the Care Commission will come in and say yes we agree or no we don't," says McLaughlin. "So if you've said 'I'm excellent at all this' ... sorry, nobody's excellent. There's always room for improvement in childcare."

Hill stresses there will be no opportunity in the new system for providers to paint dishonest pictures of themselves. He says: "We are very clear that part of what we do when we inspect is to check and verify the self-assessment that is made; we do not simply accept the assessment that's given."

Hill believes that over time, the new system will prove to be a much more powerful tool for improving services than the current inspection regime. "Publishing the grades on our website is an important way in which we can augment the information we are providing for people who may want to use care services and help them make their minds up," he says.

McLaughlin adds: "People shouldn't feel, 'oh, this is some other exercise we've got to do'. If we do this in the way the Care Commission says, it will help us with our jobs and give young people the service they want and need."

A GUIDE TO SELF-ASSESSMENT

In England, self-assessment as part of the inspection process is nothing new. Here we offer an expert guide on the best approach to evaluating your services

Don't just do it for inspectors

View self-evaluation as a rolling process rather than something to be completed once a year for the benefit of inspectors. "It's crucial to put in place mechanisms that treat this as a year-round programme," says Bernadette Duffy, head of the Thomas Coram Early Childhood Centre in Camden. John Harris, director of children's services at Hertfordshire County Council, adds: "The important thing is that you don't just do the self-evaluation for the occasion of inspection; it's a tool the setting can use to ensure it keeps on top of its overall development and improvement."

Delegate

Involve staff in gathering intelligence for self-assessment, and don't feel that as a manager you have to do it all yourself. "Figure out what needs to be done, talk to the parents, the staff, governors if you have them, and divide tasks up," says Duffy.

Learn how to interpret data

Develop an understanding of how to interpret data. Self-evaluation places an emphasis on settings being able to draw conclusions on their performance by analysing raw data on their services. "Good self-evaluations will be able to link what settings are doing with their analysis of where they are - why they're doing what they're doing," says David Hawker, chair of the standards, performance and inspection policy committee for the Association of Directors of Children's Services. "If a setting has a good self-evaluation that shows what it's doing in response to problems and has a credible story to tell, even one that isn't doing well will tend to come out okay because the prospects for improvement are good."

Be prepared for change

Inspection body Ofsted is preparing a more comprehensive self-evaluation framework to accompany the Early Years Foundation Stage, which comes into effect in September. This will require providers to consider a much broader range of factors during the self-evaluation process, including what they do well, what areas they need to improve, how well they meet the needs of each child, the strengths and weaknesses of staff and whether they meet the requirements of the new curriculum. An Ofsted spokesman says: "The self-evaluation element of the Early Years Foundation Stage will not be mandatory, but if it is available the inspector will use it to plan and focus the inspections. The pilot inspections we have carried out showed that a well-completed self-evaluation form can lead to the inspector spending less time in the setting."

Be prepared for questions

Don't be surprised if inspectors question your self-assessment. "There are going to be differing views between someone being inspected and the inspector, where self-assessment might score someone high, but the inspector finds it to be different," says Jim Wallace, assistant director of Barnardo's Scotland. "The key thing is that the dialogue around any difference in opinion is open; the exchange around different perceptions will be important."