What this is
The Care Inspectorate’s first annual report on restrictive practices used in Scotland’s residential childcare settings, announced in the regulator’s own release on 12 May 2026. It sets out data on recorded incidents of physical restraint and seclusion notified to the Inspectorate by residential care services for children and young people.
It exists because of a recommendation in The Promise, the Scottish Government’s response to its care review, that restraint and seclusion be recorded and reported nationally, to establish how often the practices are used and to monitor progress towards stopping them. That makes it a baseline document: the first in what is intended to be a series.
What it records
No figures appear on this page, and that is a deliberate limit rather than an omission. The statistical bulletin itself could not be retrieved when the record behind this entry was compiled, and the vault does not fill a gap with an estimate.
What the sources held do carry is the regulator’s stated position. Its chief executive writes that Scotland is “striving to become a country where no child or young person has their liberty unnecessarily restricted”, that rights “may only be restricted as a last resort, including in the use of restraint”, and that publication is intended to give “greater transparency on the direction of travel for the sector”.
Those are commitments, and commitments are not counts. A reader looking for the number of restraint incidents in Scotland’s children’s homes in the reporting year will not find it here, and will not find a number that looks like it.
How to read it
Three rules, and the first is the reason the page is short.
A publication that commits to counting is not evidence that anything has fallen. If a later edition shows a total, the comparison to make is with this baseline on the same definitions, not with the ambition stated in the foreword.
A national total of notifications is what services reported, not necessarily what happened. The record says the data comes from notifications by residential care services, which means the number is produced by the same people whose practice it describes.
And the chief executive’s statements are the regulator’s position on rights. They are quotable as that, and they are not a finding against any service, any manager or any member of staff.
Where it stops
Scotland, residential childcare, one reporting year. The bulletin returned a 404 when the record was compiled, so the coverage, the definitions, the size of the sector and any breakdown by age, disability or type of restraint are all unknown to this page. Nothing here should be read as a rate, a trend or a comparison with any other part of the United Kingdom.
It rests on a single source, the regulator’s media release, and the vault holds the record at `probable` for that reason.
No equivalent routine publication for children’s homes in England is held in this archive, so there is nothing on this shelf to set the Scottish figure against. That absence is itself worth knowing, and it is not a finding of this report.
Sources
Where a service is being asked to reduce restraint in a setting with children, our training on vulnerable and volatile people starts with the recording that makes a number count.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.