On-call answers two questions: who can act tonight, and what did they do. Cover is part of the staff rota: it is set up and published like the rest of it.

Open On-Call from the sidebar under Daily work. The page shows a month calendar of published cover. Select a name on a day to see that person's phone number and email. Each name says whether the cover is for All homes or for one home only, and a past day with no cover is flagged amber. The numbers and emails of a person covering one home only are shown to people who can already act in that home.

What being on-call actually gives someone

Read this before you put anyone on cover.

Company-wide on-call cover on the rota is company-scoped and time-bounded, and only counts once it is published. A draft gives nobody anything. While it is in force, and only while it is in force, the holder can reach the other homes in their own company on a two-tier basis:

Homes they are a member of — their normal access, unchanged.
Homes they are not assigned to — a read-only summary of the home and of the young people in it, and the on-call log. Nothing else.

That summary is a minimal safety set: safety flags, active risks, current plans, the social worker's details, recent incidents. It is enough to handle a call at two in the morning. It is not the record.

Three limits are absolute and worth stating plainly:

It never crosses a company. The cover is tied to one company, and the elevation is derived from it. There is no configuration that widens this.
It never reaches DSL depth. Safeguarding records, DSL-private content and the safeguarding audit log stay gated to that home's designated leads. Being on-call does not touch them.
It never allows editing. The elevation reaches the home summary, the child summary and the on-call log — and nothing else. Every other permission depends on being a member of the home.

It also expires by itself when the window ends. Nothing has to be revoked, and nobody has to remember.

Finally: every summary read is recorded, and the record distinguishes a home member reading their own home from someone reading it under on-call cover.

Planning cover

Company-wide cover is set by a company admin, and by nobody else: a home manager builds their own home's rota, but cannot put someone on company-wide cover, because that is what opens the other homes to them.

Open Company Admin from the sidebar, then On-call cover in the Rotas & pay group. The page is described as "Company-wide cover: the people who can step in at any of your homes out of hours."

Add the cover. In Add cover, choose the Person, the start date and time, the end date and time (UK time), and an optional Note. A single piece of cover can last at most 31 days. It starts as a Draft, visible only to administrators.
Publish it. In Publish dates, give From and To (inclusive). Cover gives access only inside a published range, and publishing covers all cover that starts inside it, including cover you add later. It never affects any home's own rota: a home's own shifts are published by that home.
Change it later. Removing cover, or unpublishing its dates, ends the access on the person's next request.

A home's own on-call shifts (set by its manager on the home rota) are rota and pay only. They show as who is on call, but they do not open other homes.

The On-Call page shows published cover only. Anyone currently covering shows On-call now.

Working a shift

The home switcher and the summaries only appear for the person who holds published, active company-wide cover right now. A manager building next month's rota does not get them.

For the person on-call, a Homes card lists every home in the company, each badged Full or Summary so it is obvious which kind of access you have before you open it. Select a home for its summary, then a young person for theirs.

Going to the home

Sometimes the call is not enough and you go. When you do, open the home's summary and select I'm attending. That records the attendance in the on-call log with the time, and while it is open:

the home's summary shows the building: the address, and the home's managers and designated safeguarding leads with their phone numbers;
a child's summary shows their Positive Behaviour Support Plan and Missing From Home plan in full, so you can read them before you arrive;
you can record an incident and record a physical intervention from the On-Call page, in the home you are attending. They are filed against that home, submitted for its manager to review like any other, and cross-linked from the on-call log. If you used the measure yourself, you are named as the person who used it.

Nothing else opens. Journals, plans, documents and safeguarding records stay closed, exactly as they are on the phone, and the home's own pages stay closed to you too. If a disclosure happens while you are there, log it as a safeguarding entry and the DSL picks it up.

When you leave, select I've left and write a handover note. The day shift reads it in that day's handover, in your words. The home's managers also get one notification when you leave, saying who attended, when, what was recorded and which children's summaries were read, with your handover note. It never quotes a safeguarding log entry.

Attending ends with your cover: once it has expired, an open attendance gives you nothing, though you can still close it.

The home's summary also lists who is on shift tonight: the people on the published rota for the next twelve hours, by name, role and shift, plus whoever holds company-wide on-call cover. It carries no phone numbers beyond the managers and leads above, and no leave or pay.

The on-call log

Under the selected home's summary sits On-call log — [home], described as "Routes to the home's manager (and DSL for safeguarding)."

Choose a category — general, safeguarding, medical, behaviour or other — write what you handled in the box marked "What did you handle?", and select Log.

The entry is filed against that home, not yours, and ARC notifies:

every manager of that home, always;
that home's designated safeguarding leads as well, when the category is safeguarding.

A safeguarding entry is treated like the rest of a home's safeguarding record. What you wrote goes to the home's designated safeguarding leads. A manager who is not one of them is told that a safeguarding entry was logged, but not what it says, and in the log itself they see the entry's category, author and time with the text withheld. You can always read your own entries.

You are never notified about your own entry. ARC also records which on-call cover you were acting under, so the log shows not just what happened but the authority you were acting on. Each time someone opens a home's log, that read is recorded in the same way as a summary read.

The log is the point of the whole feature. A call handled at 3am and never written down is a call the day team cannot pick up.