Opening a children's home: getting your records set up before registration

Before registration, set up the records the home will keep from its first day: a file for every member of staff with their checks and references, the home's own procedures and forms, the Statement of Purpose as a document with versions, and the register of recurring safety checks. Getting these into one system before the first child arrives means the home opens with its records already in shape, rather than catching up during the busiest weeks it will ever have.

This post is about the records and the software, not the registration process. What registration involves is set by your regulator — Ofsted in England, Care Inspectorate Wales, the Care Inspectorate in Scotland or RQIA in Northern Ireland — and your regulator publishes the requirements. Read those first, and treat everything below as the practical side of keeping the paperwork in order.

Why set up software before a children's home is registered?

Because the months before opening are the quietest the records will ever be. There are no daily logs yet, no rota running round the clock, no handovers. It is the one time a manager can decide how things will be recorded without having to record them at the same time.

There is a second reason. Much of what you put together before opening — recruitment checks, the home's procedures, the document that says what the home is for — shows how the home is run. If it is built in a word processor and a shared drive and moved into a system later, you do the work twice and some of it gets lost in the move. Start where you mean to carry on.

Which records should a new children's home set up first?

Roughly in this order, because each one leans on the one before:

• The home itself: its name, address, regulator and the local council it sits in.
• The people who will use the system, each with the access their job needs and no more.
• A staff file for every person you are recruiting, with their checklist of checks and forms.
• The home's procedures and forms: what happens after an incident, a missing episode, a complaint.
• The Statement of Purpose, written and kept as a document with versions.
• The register of recurring checks: fire alarms, gas safety, electrical reports, the vehicle.

Children's records come last, because there are none yet. That is the point: by the time the first referral arrives, everything around the child is already in place.

How should staff files be set up while you are recruiting?

Open a file for each person as soon as they are a serious candidate, not once they have started. Recruitment is where a home's staff records are most often thin, because the checks happen over weeks, by email, between several people.

A good staff file holds the person's checklist — background check, right to work, references, identity, signed forms — with the evidence stored on each item and the date it was done. It names the background check the way your nation does: DBS in England and Wales, PVG in Scotland, AccessNI in Northern Ireland. And it knows which dates lapse, so a renewal two years from now is not something somebody has to remember.

Two details are worth getting right early. First, decide who can see what: restricted documents such as HR and occupational health records should be open to very few people. Second, put a policy acknowledgement on everyone's checklist, so that each person signing the home's policies and handbook is recorded on their own file rather than on a sheet in a drawer.

Should a children's home keep its policies and procedures in software?

Your policies are yours. No software company should write them for you, and a policy copied from someone else's home rarely describes how yours works. What software can do is hold the procedures and forms that put those policies into practice, so they happen rather than sit in a binder.

A useful test for any system: can you write “after an incident where somebody was hurt, a manager reviews it and a debrief is held with the child” as a procedure, so that recording such an incident opens those steps with a named person and a date? And are the forms behind those steps the home's own, with wording you can change, rather than a fixed template?

Set these up before opening and you will have time to argue about the wording with your deputy, rather than finding out on the first night that the debrief form asks the wrong question.

How should a new home keep its Statement of Purpose?

As a living document with versions, not as a file called “SoP final v3 (2)”. The Statement of Purpose describes what the home is for, who it is for and how it works, and it will change: when you add a place, take a different age range, or change how something is done.

Keep each version finalised and dated, with a record of what changed from the one before. Keep the registered details — places, ages, the needs the home can meet — in one place, so the document cannot disagree with itself. And keep it where the rest of your records can see it: when a referral arrives, the first question is whether the home can meet that child's needs as the Statement of Purpose describes them.

Each nation names and groups this document a little differently. Your regulator publishes what it should cover.

What changes when the first child arrives?

If the groundwork is done, very little changes in the system and a great deal changes in the home. The referral is checked against the Statement of Purpose, the admission starts the procedures you set up for a child moving in, and the child's record begins on their first day rather than being pieced together later.

Staff who used the system during recruitment — signing their forms, checking their own details — already know their way round it. On the first night shift, that matters more than any feature.

How Careframe handles this

Careframe is free until your home is registered, so you can set up staff files, procedures, forms, the Statement of Purpose and your recurring checks while you wait, and only start paying once you are live. You choose your regulator when you set the home up, and the registration number can be left blank and added later in Home settings. After registration it is priced per home per month by number of beds, with no contract and no setup fee.

Careframe organises and evidences the work a children's home already does. Nothing here is legal or regulatory advice, and nothing here is a statement of what your regulator requires of you — for that, go to your regulator.