A risk assessment records one risk, how likely and serious it is, what is being done about it, and the decision on whether an activity is allowed. It always belongs to a plan.

The thing to understand first

A new risk assessment is not live. It is created as pending review, and a manager has to approve it before it becomes active.

Until it is approved:

it does not appear in Risks and agreed approach on the young person's profile
it does not appear in the list of active risk assessments
nobody is asked to acknowledge it

Writing one is therefore only the first half of the job. The second half is getting a manager to approve it. Until that happens the team is still working without it, however carefully it is written.

Everyone else in the home does get a notification when the assessment is created. That is a heads-up, not the acknowledgement request.

Write one

Risk assessments hang off a plan, so start from a plan.

Open the plan, then New risk assessment. From the young person's profile you can also use Add risk assessment under Care, health & education; that button is disabled until the young person has at least one plan, with the tooltip "Add a plan first".
Title and Category / type are required. The category is chosen from a fixed list: Behaviour, CSE / Exploitation, Contact / Family Time, Independence, Missing / Absconding, Health / Medication, Online Safety, Education, Self-Harm / Suicide Risk, Substance Misuse, Sexualised Behaviour, Physical Intervention, Other. Choosing Other asks you to Describe type.
Risk rating. Choose a Likelihood and an Impact, each from 1 to 5, or pick a square on the matrix. ARC works out the score as likelihood times impact, out of 25, and shows its band: Low (1 to 3), Moderate (4 to 6), High (8 to 12) or Extreme (15 to 25). Choose both, or leave both as Not rated; choosing only one is refused.
Summary, Key risks and Control measures are all optional in the software. Control measures are the part people read on shift.
Decision is Not set, Allowed, Restricted or Not allowed. Conditions and Review due sit beside it, both optional.
Related previous assessments is optional. The search needs at least two characters and looks across this young person's assessments.
Create risk assessment.

Update one

Open the assessment and select Edit. Anyone who can write a risk assessment in the home can edit one. The form is the same, with an optional What changed, and why? box that is shown in the version history. Save changes reports "Saved as version 2", or "No changes to save" if nothing staff work to has changed.

A real change is a new version. You are recorded as having acknowledged it, and everyone else in the home is notified. The assessment also goes back to the manager for review.

What happens next depends on where it was. If it was already in force it stays in force while it waits, so staff are not left working to the old version, and they are asked to read the new version from their dashboard. If it was still awaiting review, nobody is asked to read it from their dashboard until a manager approves it.

An older assessment that was scored with a single number keeps that number, shown without a band, until it is rated on the matrix.

Manager review

A manager opens the assessment and finds a Manager review panel. Until it is reviewed it reads "Awaiting manager review."

Approve makes the assessment active. There is an optional Approval note. Acknowledgement requests follow from here.
Send back asks a named member of staff for changes, with a note. Undo sign-off takes an approval back. Both are described in Send back a record or undo a sign-off.

If the assessment changes while the manager has it open, ARC says so and refuses the approval until they reload. The panel shows who approved it and when; managers also see a Review history of every step. A Version history panel shows what changed between versions.

When the plan is deleted

If a manager deletes the plan, its risk assessments stay in force and say so. See Delete and restore a plan.

Replacing the picture

You can also link a new assessment to earlier ones under Related previous assessments; the new assessment then shows a Related assessment history trail with each earlier one's type, score, date and decision.