Every gap in your records, counted, owned and in one place.

What does Inspection ready check?

Twelve areas, grouped by the part of Careframe they live in. Run the home: safer recruitment, staffing cover, supervision and probation, and health and safety checks. Care for the child: keeping children safe, independent visits and reviews, management oversight, statement of purpose and policies, plans and health, and children's voice and complaints. Grow the team: training and competencies.

Nobody types anything into it. It reads the staff files, the rota against your own staffing rules, the compliance register and the care records, so the gaps it shows are the gaps in the records themselves.

Fix first, Action needed, Needs a look

Every gap sits in one of three bands. Fix first is for what matters whatever else is true — someone working with pre-start checks outstanding, or a short-staffed day in the next 72 hours. Action needed is wrong now: something expired or failed, or a job nobody is signed off to do. Needs a look is routine work that is overdue or due soon.

The list runs worst first: band, then anything about to happen, then the oldest. There is one row per person per area, so six missing checks for one new starter read as one job with six parts. An area whose records could not be loaded, or have not been checked recently, says so instead of showing as clear.

Who deals with each gap, and is the home getting better?

Each gap names who deals with it — the home's manager or deputy, by name — and how long it has been open. The counts are saved every night, so once there are two days to compare the page can say the count has gone down since an earlier date. A Director sees every home on one page, worst first, each with when it was last checked.

What people see follows their permissions. An area from a part of Careframe someone cannot open reads “Not shown to you” and is left out of their count, rather than counting as fine.

The inspection pack: your evidence in one download

A manager can download the inspection pack as one zip. It opens with a cover sheet listing every open gap, then a spreadsheet of the gaps and who deals with each, the compliance register and its sign-offs, the staff list, the rota for the last two weeks and the next, thirty days of activity, and a PDF for each compliance check and each member of staff. When the person making it has care oversight, it also carries the home's figures for its young people. A README says what is inside and what was left out.

An inspector portal with passes that end on their own

Inspectors and other visitors read the home's records through their own pass, with no account to set up. A manager issues the pass for 24 hours, 48 hours, 72 hours or seven days. The visitor taps a link, the pass ends on its own, and revoking it takes effect on their next click.

There are four kinds of pass. A regulator's inspector sees every child's file. An independent visitor sees the files of children whose own agreement and their placing authority's are recorded, and can write their visit report in the portal. A placing authority or reviewing officer sees only the children the manager ticks. An auditor the company brings in sees what the manager chooses.

• What has changed since

  Counts since a date — admissions, physical interventions, missing episodes, complaints and more — each opening the records behind it.

• Ask the manager

  A visitor's question becomes a follow-up for the manager, and the answer comes back to the portal.

• Search on every page

  Children, records, documents and visit reports, limited to what the pass opens.

• What they looked at

  The manager sees, in plain words, what each visitor opened, asked for and downloaded.

Four nations, four regulators

When you set up a home you choose its regulator: Ofsted in England, Care Inspectorate Wales, the Care Inspectorate in Scotland or RQIA in Northern Ireland. That choice sets the home's nation pack, which decides the inspection headings the home's checks sit under, the names of its documents and visits, the background check on a staff file (DBS, PVG or AccessNI) and which bank holidays count when working days are worked out.

Visit and review rhythms start from the pack and are the home's to change. Falling behind your own rhythm reads amber, never red.

Questions people ask

Read next

• Care for the child
• Compliance
• Staff files
• Director view