The three options
| Option | Strengths | Risks |
|---|---|---|
| Paper and shared drives | Cheap to start; familiar. | No audit trail; hard to restrict access; evidence takes days to collate; easy to lose or alter. |
| General care or HR software | Polished; may already be used elsewhere in the group. | Built for adult care or general HR, not SI 2015/541; Regulation 44 independence and restraint deadlines usually missing. |
| Specialist children's home software | Built around the regulations and how Ofsted inspects. | Check data hosting, security and pricing carefully; quality varies. |
12 questions to ask any supplier
Supplier scorecard
Tick each question your current or shortlisted supplier can answer “yes” to. The most important questions count for more.
0%
Significant gaps for a regulated children's home.
The Residential Childcare App answers yes to all twelve.
The cost of doing it by hand
The hidden cost of paper and spreadsheets is manager time: pulling together incident logs, restraint records and notifications for each Regulation 44 visit, each Regulation 45 review and each inspection. Estimate yours.
What is evidence-gathering costing you?
Time spent collating by hand
12 hours · £264 a month
Your own estimate, for comparison with the £129 a month the app costs. When records are kept in one place as you go, most of that collating disappears.
Security questions in more detail
- Where is the data? Ask for the hosting country and provider, and how long backups are kept.
- Who can see what? Can a worker at one home see children at another? Can the Regulation 44 independent person see more than they should?
- How do people sign in? Passwords alone are not enough for this data. Ask for multi-factor authentication or passkeys for everyone.
- Can records be changed silently? Ask how changes are recorded and whether the audit trail itself can be altered.
- How long will the encryption last? Case records are kept for decades. The NCSC has set out a timeline for moving to post-quantum cryptography; ask whether the supplier has started.
How the Residential Childcare App handles this
Hosted in AWS London. Passkeys or an authenticator app for every account. Database-level isolation between organisations, staff limited to their homes, and independent persons limited to their appointments. A hash-chained audit trail. Sensitive fields encrypted per organisation with a hybrid post-quantum (ML-KEM) scheme, and Regulation 44 reports signed with ML-DSA. Orvanta Group Ltd is registered with the ICO (ZB972103).
Try it free for 14 days with your own homes.