Plans are written by the home's manager or their deputy. A senior is front-line here, not an author.

There is no submit, review or approve step on a plan. Nothing waits for a second person's sign-off. What replaces it is a read-confirmation: when a plan is saved, every member of the home is asked to confirm they have read that version. So the moment to be careful is before you save, not after.

If you are a staff member or senior, your part is confirming you have read it.

Create a plan

Open the young person, then Plans, then New plan. You can also start from the home-wide Plans page — New Plan there asks you to pick a young person first.
Choose the Plan Type. The type is set here and defines the form you get. Health Care, Education and Positive Behaviour Support open a full structured form; the rest use the shared fields. If you pick Custom, give the plan a Plan Name as well as a title. The type's fixed Purpose of this plan statement appears under the picker.
Give it a Plan Title.
Set the Effective Date and the Review Date. The review date must be after the effective date. ARC refuses "Review date must be after effective date" if it is not.
Write the Structured Summary if the type has one, and fill in the type's own sections if it has them. The three structured types have no summary box; their purpose statement stands in for it. Fields that come from another record are shown read-only — you cannot type over them.
Check the Plan Status. It starts as Active. Active publishes the plan, and every other member of the home is asked to read and confirm it. Draft keeps it out of the team's way: nobody is asked to read a draft, and the request goes out with the version that makes the plan Active.
Select Create Plan — or Save Draft to save it as a draft.

When you create an Active plan you are recorded as having confirmed it yourself, so it does not appear in your own list of plans to read.

Add goals

Open the plan, choose the Goals tab, then Add Goal. A goal takes a Goal Title, a Status of active or inactive, and a Measurement Type (Frequency-based, Binary, Observational or Attendance-based); description, target date, review date and an event threshold are optional. From the actions menu on a goal you can choose Edit goal or Archive goal; an archived goal stays on the plan for reference, marked archived.

Goals carry a stable identity, which is what lets a log, a keywork session or an incident be attached to one of them.

Revise a plan

Edit Plan on the plan header reopens the same form. Save, and ARC writes a new version — v1, v2, and so on.

A new version reopens the read-confirmation for everyone else. Whoever made the change is confirmed automatically; every other member of the home is notified and asked to confirm the new version. They can only confirm after opening that version of the plan. Archiving a plan asks nobody to read anything. Changing only the timestamp or who last touched it does not count as a change and does not bump the version.

This is the whole safety mechanism on plans, so revise deliberately: a correction to a typo asks everyone else in the home to re-read a document.

Who can see the buttons

New plan, Edit Plan, Version History and Delete plan are only shown to the home's registered manager. A deputy holds the authoring permission on the server and can create or edit a plan, but the buttons are currently hidden from them. Deleting is narrower still: it is the manager's alone, never the deputy's. See Delete and restore a plan. Add Goal is shown to everyone, and anyone below the manager-or-deputy tier is refused when they use it.

If ARC refuses, the wording says "Only managers can…" — but the rule the server applies is manager or deputy.