Adding a young person creates their record and opens their placement at a home in the same action. Everything staff write from then on — logs, journals, incidents, plans — hangs off this record.

This is a company admin job. There is no way to add a young person from a home's own screens, so if you are a manager, the person you need is a company admin.

Before you start

The home must not be on the Prepare plan. A home that is not registered with Ofsted yet may be on the Prepare plan, which has no child records. ARC will not let you add a child to it. Move the home to the Full plan first. See The Prepare plan.

The home must be active. The home picker on this form lists active homes only, so a home still in draft will simply not appear. See Add a home.

You also need the identifier your local authority uses for this young person. ARC calls it the LA Number and it must be unique within the home.

Add the record

Open the list. Sidebar, Company Admin, the Children tile — "Add children and place them in a home". The list is headed Children.
Select Add Child.

Fill in the form.

Field	Required	Notes
Home	Yes	Active homes only
LA Number	Yes	"A unique identifier for this child within the selected home"
First name / Last name	No
Preferred name	No	"What staff call the child day to day, if different from their first name"
Date of birth	No	Must be in the past. "Used for age-appropriate support and health planning"
Social worker name / email / phone	No
Placement Start Date	No	Defaults to today if left blank
Placement End Date	No	Cannot be before the start date

Select Create Child.

What ARC creates

Two things, together: the young person's record, and their placement at the chosen home.

The placement is the thing that says this young person lived at this home, from this date. If you left the start date blank, it opens today. If you filled in an end date, the placement is created already ended — so use it for a placement you are recording after the fact, not one that is starting.

Names and the LA Number

ARC shows the young person's full name wherever it can, and falls back to the LA Number only when no name has been recorded. The LA Number stays as the identifier, and the record's URLs use a UUID rather than either — a child's name never appears in a link.

The uniqueness rule is per home: two young people in different homes can share an LA Number, two in the same home cannot.

After you've added them

The record appears in the Children list with its home, placement dates and the date it was created. Front-line staff reach the same young person through Children in their own sidebar, at the home they are working in.