Software for children's houses in Scotland.

What changes when you choose the Care Inspectorate.

Whether you call it a children's house, a residential childcare service or a children's home, you set it up the same way. On the Registration step you choose "Care Inspectorate — Scotland" from a list of four regulators. The number box then asks for your Care Inspectorate CS number, and quietly warns you if what you type does not look like CS followed by ten digits. You can skip it and add the number before you finish. The same step asks which local authority the home sits in.

The Care pages, in the words a Scottish home uses.

Four rows in the Care part of the sidebar are relabelled, and the pages they open are titled to match.

• Aims and objectives

  Where an English home sees a Statement of Purpose, yours sees Aims and objectives, with its own set of questions — what the service is for, who it is for, how admissions are decided, how it is staffed. Careframe counts how complete it is against those questions, not England's.

• Young people's guide

  The guide for the young people living with you is called the Young people's guide. Its contact questions name the Care Inspectorate and the children's commissioner for Scotland. Careframe does not fill in a phone number it has not checked.

• Independent visits

  The visitor is called an independent visitor, the rhythm starts at quarterly, and the report goes to the provider. It is your rhythm: change it, or tell Careframe not to keep track. Falling behind shows amber, never red, and never counts as overdue.

• Self-evaluation

  Instead of a quality review with a report to send, a Scottish home keeps a yearly self-evaluation. There is no report recipient to chase.

Inspection headings, people's titles and who you tell.

On the Care inspection page the three headings are the Care Inspectorate's own key questions, so "How good is our leadership?" sits where an English home would see a different framework's words. The person who oversees the home for the provider is called the Provider lead, on the sign-off tick, in Messages and on the permissions grid.

When something happens to a child that you decide to report, the prompt on the child's record reads "Tell the Care Inspectorate and the placing authority", and the step is labelled Care Inspectorate notification. What you report, and when, stays your judgement.

PVG checks on every staff file.

The default onboarding checklist names the background check as a "PVG scheme record (Disclosure Scotland)". The evidence guidance, the renewal date, the candidate's declaration and the interview questions all say PVG. The DBS Update Service chip, which only makes sense for a DBS, does not appear.

The Level 3 qualification item uses neutral wording for a Scottish home and carries no due date, rather than a guessed one. Default items carry a Care Inspectorate-standard tag. A checklist or form you have already edited keeps your wording.

Scotland's bank holidays on the rota and the timesheet.

The calendar and the timesheet bank-holiday check use the Scotland calendar for a Care Inspectorate home. The Checks card in Timesheets › Settings says so in plain words. If your home sits near a border and runs a different calendar, a manager can pick another one there, and the change is written to the audit log.

Everything else is the same Careframe.

The pack changes words, rhythms and the calendar. The rest of the product works the same in every nation. Run the home: staff files, rotas and timesheets, compliance checks, home finance. Care for the child: daily logs, handover, incidents, plans and medication on one record per young person. The Director view puts every home side by side, worst first.

Inspection ready reads the home's own records and gives you a count of gaps across twelve areas, each with who deals with it and how long it has been open. It is a count, not a grade. An inspector you give a pass to sees the home described in the Care Inspectorate's terms.

Questions people ask

Read next

• Inspection ready
• Staff files
• Care for the child
• Director view