Paper records: what to weigh before you go digital
Most children's homes in England were recording on paper until fairly recently, and plenty still are. If that is you, the pitch you have probably heard is that paper is a compliance risk and you are one inspection away from trouble. That is not true, and this page does not make that argument.
Paper is not your problem. Assembling it is: the handover nobody had time to compile, the evidence somebody rebuilds in the evening, the manager reading everything to find what needs attention. That is the job Arc takes off you, and the rest of this page is what that looks like.
The short version
The problem with paper is not recording, it is assembling. Every fact is written down somewhere. Nobody can see across it: not the person coming on shift, not the manager on a Monday morning, not an inspector asking what has changed for a child since March.
Moving costs less than people expect, because you do not convert the archive. You pick a date and start recording new entries digitally. The old files stay exactly where they are.
Paper is fully compliant. The regulations do not say anything about format. A home that keeps paper records well is meeting its obligations. The question is not whether you are compliant, but what it costs you to prove it.
Where paper costs you
Three things, and they are all about assembly rather than recording. Each one is a job Arc does for you instead.
The handover. The information exists. It is in the daily log, and the incident book, and something a colleague meant to mention. The person coming on shift reads whichever of those they get to, and what they miss is invisible until it matters. Inconsistent handover is the single most common thing managers describe when they talk about why they started looking.
Arc compiles the handover from what staff logged during the shift. Nobody rebuilds it at 7am, and nobody has to know which book to check.
Producing evidence on the day. When an inspector asks what has changed for a child over the last six months, or how a particular risk has been managed since it was identified, the answer is in the folder. Somebody has to go and assemble it, usually in the evening, usually the manager. The record was never the problem. Finding it was.
Regulation 44 and 45 reports are compiled from the record you already keep, and inspectors get an access-controlled portal instead of a folder and an evening.
Seeing what needs attention. A manager cannot know what is outstanding this morning without physically reading everything, so in practice they read some of it, and the rest surfaces later.
Compliance rules run nightly and surface what is slipping on the manager dashboard, before it becomes a finding rather than after.
And one that is easy to miss:
Seventy-five years of storage. Regulation 36(2) requires case records to be kept for 75 years from the child's date of birth, or 15 years from the date of death where a child dies before turning 18. They must be held securely in the home while the child is accommodated there, and in a secure place afterwards.[1] If the home closes, those records have to be transferred, not disposed of.[1] That is a physical obligation that only grows, and it is worth pricing the cupboard.
It is also worth saying plainly that paper is not safer for being offline. A folder that cannot be found is a personal data problem in the same way a compromised login is, and it is harder to prove what was in it.
Write it once. Arc does the rest.
This is the part that is hard to picture from the outside, so here it is concretely. A support worker records one keywork session during an evening shift. Nobody types it again, and nobody goes looking for it later.
Staff write it once
A support worker records the keywork session in Arc during the shift. The author and the time are captured automatically.
Arc files it
It lands in the young person's journal for that day, next to everything else recorded on the shift.
Arc compiles the handover
The next person on shift reads it in the handover Arc built for them. Nobody assembles it at 7am.
Arc connects it
It sits against the same young person as their plan, their risk assessment and any open incident, ready for the next Regulation 45 report.
That is four jobs done from one entry. On paper it is one entry and three other places somebody has to remember to look, every shift, for every child.
See it on your own recordsOne record, not four folders.
Arc was built for residential children's homes specifically, and the thing it does that paper cannot is connect a child's record: the daily log feeds the journal, the journal feeds the handover, and the incident, the plan and the risk assessment all sit against the same young person rather than in four different places.
That is the whole argument, and it is the one thing paper cannot do at any price.
Less has to move than you think
Arc stays focused on the record, so the rest of how you run the home carries on unchanged.
- Your rota stays where it is. Arc keeps the record and leaves rostering to the specialist tools, so the staff duty rosters required by Schedule 4 carry on exactly as they do today.[2]
- Your medication recording stays where it is. Prescribed medication sits in the health care plan alongside the rest of the record, and dose administration stays in the MAR you already run.
- The placing authority's paperwork stays theirs. Arc holds the home's record, so local-authority-owned statutory documents keep working the way they already do.
Pricing is published. £149 a month for a home with 1 to 3 registered beds, £199 for 4 to 6, £249 for 7 or more. Unlimited staff, every feature, no minimum contract. Onboarding, training and help moving records across are included. Pay annually and you pay for ten months rather than twelve.
What going digital actually involves
You do not scan the archive. Closed and historic records stay where they are, stored as the regulations require. You choose a date and record new entries in the new system from then on. Anyone quoting you for a bulk scanning project is solving a problem you do not have.
Plan to run both for a few weeks. Not as a permanent state, but staff build the habit at different speeds and a short overlap costs less than a hard cut-over that half the team does not follow.
The training burden lands on your least confident staff, not your most. That is the group to judge any system by. A platform that a digitally confident deputy finds elegant and a long-serving support worker finds impossible has failed, whatever the feature list says.
Ask what happens when the connection drops. Homes are not offices. This question separates systems quickly.
It only works if the manager runs it. Every home that has made this work had someone who checked, every day, for the first month. Every home where it failed bought a system and hoped.
Nothing requires you to leave paper
Regulation 36 of the Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015 requires the registered person to maintain case records for each child which "include the information and documents listed in Schedule 3", are "kept up to date", and are "signed and dated by the author of each entry".[1]
It says nothing about how. A hardback book, signed and dated, meets that requirement exactly as well as a database does. If a supplier tells you Ofsted expects digital records, ask them to show you where it says so. They cannot, because it does not.
So the question was never whether paper is permitted. It is what it costs you to prove what you did, and that is a question about assembly rather than compliance.
What paper is genuinely good at
Worth setting out properly, with what each one does and does not get you.
- It costs nothing. No licence and no per-home fee, though the 75-year storage obligation above carries a cost of its own.
- There is no training. A new starter can record properly on their first shift with thirty seconds of explanation. What they cannot do on that shift is see what happened on the last one.
- It never goes down. No outage, no failed login at 3am, no dead wifi in a house with thick walls. It also cannot be read from two places at once, or from anywhere but the room it is kept in.
- Signing and dating is trivial, which matters, because Regulation 36 explicitly requires it. Arc records the author and time on every entry automatically, with an append-only audit trail behind it.
- Staff trust it. A recording system the team quietly works around is worse than one they believe in, which is why any system you look at should be tested by the people who will actually use it.
If your team records well on paper, you already have the hard part. The discipline is the difficult bit, and you already have it. Arc is what turns that discipline into evidence you can produce on the day it is asked for.
When to wait
Timing matters more than most suppliers will tell you. Three situations where the better decision is to move later rather than not at all.
- One home, a settled team, inspections that go well. There is no urgency here, so there is no reason to move under pressure. Most homes in this position move when they take on a second, because that is the point at which reading across two sets of folders stops being practical.
- Mid-placement, with a child in crisis. Changing how anything is recorded mid-crisis adds risk for no benefit. Choose a quieter date and start from there. Whatever you record in the meantime comes across when you are ready.
- The team is not behind it yet. A system the staff have not bought into gets worked around. Bring them in before you commit rather than after: ask for an account and let the people who will use it decide whether it holds up.
None of these are reasons to stay on paper permanently. They are reasons to pick the month that suits the home.
Questions to ask any supplier you shortlist
Including us.
- Can a support worker who avoids computers complete a full shift's recording without help? Ask to watch one try, rather than watching a salesperson do it.
- What happens to an entry if the connection drops halfway through writing it?
- Is every entry signed and dated by its author, as Regulation 36 requires, and can you show me that in the system?
- What happens to our records if we leave you, or if you stop trading? In what format do we get them?
- Who can see safeguarding material, and can you show me the audit trail of who has opened a record?
- What does it cost per home with everything included, and how long is the contract?
- What does the first month look like for the person who has to run it?
Common questions
Do we have to scan our existing paper files?
No. Keep them stored as Regulation 36 requires and start fresh from a chosen date. Scanning is occasionally worth it for a small number of live documents, never for the archive.
Will Ofsted expect us to be digital?
No. The regulations are silent on format. Inspection is concerned with whether records are complete, current, signed, secure and available, not what they are written on.
How long does it take?
The software part is short. The habit part is the first month, and it depends almost entirely on whether the registered manager is checking daily.
What if half the team is not confident with computers?
Then that is your selection criterion, and it should be tested with them before you buy rather than assumed. It is a fair reason to rule a system out.
Can we try it before deciding?
Yes. Ask any supplier for an account with realistic data in it, and put your least confident staff member in front of it.
Sources
- [1] The Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015, regulation 36. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/541/regulation/36 Checked 8 September 2026.
- [2] The Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015, Schedule 4. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2015/541/schedule/4 Checked 8 September 2026.
Everything stated above about the regulations links to the legislation and quotes it. Where we have given an opinion rather than a requirement, we have said so.