An external action is the record of a referral you have made — or are about to make — to an agency outside the home.

ARC does not contact anyone

This is the thing that must not be misunderstood. ARC holds no connection to the local authority, to the LADO, to the police or to Ofsted. Recording an external action does not send anything to anybody.

You make the referral, through that agency's own channel. Then you come back and record that you made it, when, and what reference you were given.

Recording it does not discharge the duty. Making the referral does.

The four agencies

An external action is one of exactly four types, recorded against a single concern:

Local authority
LADO
Police
Ofsted

Where a matter goes to more than one, that is more than one external action on the same concern.

The five stages

Each action carries a status, which you move on as things happen:

Status	Meaning
Not started	Identified, not yet actioned
Pending	In hand
Submitted	The referral has been made
Acknowledged	The agency has come back
Closed	Finished on their side

Alongside the status you record a reference number where the agency gave you one. The reference is the part that proves the referral happened, so it earns its keep more than anything else on the record.

It lands on the timeline

Every external action appears on the concern's Escalation & Review Timeline, in date order alongside the notes, referrals and status changes, showing who recorded it, the status and the reference.

That timeline is the answer to "what did you do about it, and when?" — which is what an inspector will ask, and why the referral and the record of it need to be close together in time.

Regulation 40 is a separate record

Notifying Ofsted of a notifiable event under Regulation 40 has its own record, raised from the incident, with its own 24-hour clock and its own compiled document. An Ofsted external action on a concern does not replace it. See Record a Regulation 40 notification.