Our standards and ratings

We inspect youth justice and probation services against published standards. These standards are designed to drive improvement in youth justice and probation services. They were developed in consultation with service providers, based on evidence, and updated when necessary. The services we inspect know what our standards are, and their services are rated against them.

This page contains information about these standards and ratings tables for each service inspected.

Our standards

Our inspectors use the standards to ask the right questions and look for evidence to rate the quality of service delivery across each aspect of a service. All services are rated overall as either ‘Outstanding’, ‘Good’, ‘Requires improvement’ or ‘Inadequate’ as well as being rated at the level of individual standards. This will assist services in targeting their improvement activity. Our reports clearly explain why we have given services a particular rating.

We refreshed our youth justice standards in 2021 and our probation service standards in October 2024. Download our standards and ratings documents:

Probation inspection

Video: Our standards for inspecting Probation Regions.

Video: Our standards for inspecting Probation Delivery Units.

Youth justice services inspection

Youth justice services inspection (from Spring 2025)

We will keep our standards under continuous review to ensure alignment with developing research evidence alongside the learning and experience from our inspections.

Video: How we rate the youth justice services that we inspect.

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Consultations: Our standards, ratings and methodology are kept under review. Overall, they have been performing well, but we want to continue to improve the way we inspect local services to support improvements in practice. As such, we often conduct consultations on this area to capture feedback from the criminal justice sector. Please see the Consultations page for more information.

Ratings tables

These tables show the overall and domain ratings from our inspections of probation and youth justice services.

Please note:

  • this table shows ratings from published inspections only
  • we will update the table as new inspection reports are published
  • inspections are listed in order of publication date.

Probation inspections

2024 – onwards – Probation inspection ratings and scores table (Spreadsheet, 40 kB)

2022-2023: Probation inspection ratings and scores table (Spreadsheet, 40 kB)

Youth justice services inspection

Youth inspection ratings and scores table (Spreadsheet, 60 kB)