If a colleague can see something you can't, it is almost never a fault. ARC layers four different things on top of each other, and you can hold several at once.

The four layers

Your home role. Assigned per home: staff, senior, deputy or manager. This is what decides day-to-day permissions — and it is per home, so you can be a manager at one and staff at another.

Your company role. Separate and company-wide. Company admin covers every home in the company. HR is its own role covering staff records only, with nothing operational.

The DSL designation. Not a role at all. It is assigned to a named person for a named home, and it is what opens safeguarding records. Someone can hold the "safeguarding" job title without it — and then they will not see the workspace.

Time-limited access. Being on call, or an inspector during a visit. Both are read-only, both expire, both are logged.

What that means in practice

A senior has the same record permissions as staff, plus the senior dashboard and sign-off of money entries (the home's and the children's). Seniors cannot finalise journals or approve risk assessments.
A deputy is the same as staff except where the manager's work is shared: care plans, managing medication, choosing what an inspector sees, and building the rota. A deputy does not sign off money.
A manager holds the review and sign-off gates for the home, other than money, which seniors sign off too. A few things stay with the manager alone, such as the go-live cutover for medication and deleting a plan.
A DSL who is otherwise a staff member sees safeguarding records but still can't finalise a journal — the two are unrelated.
A company admin can administer every home but is not automatically a DSL anywhere.

The one that catches people

The safeguarding lead role and the DSL designation are different things with similar names. Being invited as "safeguarding" changes which dashboard you land on. It does not give you access to a single safeguarding record. Only the designation does that, and only a company admin can assign it.

Why it's built this way

Every one of these boundaries exists so that access to a young person's most sensitive records is a deliberate decision about a named person, rather than a side effect of a job title. It means occasional friction — and it means the audit trail can answer "who could see this, and who decided that?".