Ask a registered manager to produce a child's case record and it arrives within minutes, complete and current. Ask the same manager for the register of children required under Schedule 4, and the pause that follows tells you where the gap actually is.

Record keeping in a children's home is treated as one job. It is legally two. Regulation 36 of the Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015 governs each child's case record: what it must contain, how long it is kept, and where it goes if the home closes. Regulation 37 governs a separate set of records entirely, the register of children, staff records, rosters, visitor logs, fire drill records, and accounts, listed in Schedule 4. Most homes are strong on the first and thin on the second, because the first is what care planning trains a manager to think about and the second sits closer to the business side of running a home.

That asymmetry is what this guide addresses. Not what a case record is, most registered managers know that cold, but what Regulation 37 actually requires, why it gets missed, and what an inspector does when they ask for a document a home did not know it needed to maintain.

The legal basis

Two regulations, two schedules, and one storage duty that sits across both.

Regulation 36 requires the registered person to maintain a case record for each child that includes the information and documents listed in Schedule 3, is kept up to date, and is signed and dated by the author of each entry. Retention is specific and long: 75 years from the child's date of birth in most cases, or 15 years from the date of death if the child dies before turning 18. While the child is accommodated, the record is kept securely in the home. After the child leaves, it moves to a secure place. Regulation 36 also sets out what happens to case records if a home closes: transfer to another home run by the same provider where one exists, or otherwise to the child's placing authority, or to the local authority holding the child's EHC plan.

Regulation 37 is a different duty. It requires the registered person to maintain the records set out in Schedule 4, keep them up to date, and retain them for at least 15 years from the date of the last entry. These are not about any one child. They are records about the home itself: who has been accommodated there, who works there, who visits, and how the building has been run.

Regulation 38 sits above both. It requires a defined list of documents, including the statement of purpose, the children's guide, case records, Schedule 4 records, complaint records, and both Regulation 44 and Regulation 45 reports, to be kept in an accessible manner. The regulation is explicit that these items may be kept in electronic form. It does not set a separate retention period. The retention duties live in Regulation 36 and Regulation 37 themselves; Regulation 38 is about accessibility, not duration.

It is worth naming a citation error before it happens: Regulation 45 is the six-monthly quality of care review, and Regulation 44 is the monthly independent visit. Neither governs case records or Schedule 4 records directly, though both produce reports that Regulation 38 requires the home to keep accessible.

What Schedule 3 requires in a case record

Schedule 3 is long and specific, organised into five groups rather than a single checklist.

Personal details cover the child's name and any previous name other than a pre-adoption name, date of birth, sex, religion if any, ethnicity and cultural and linguistic background, the child's address immediately before entering the home, and the address and type of setting the child moves to on leaving.

Contact details cover the placing authority, the child's parents, any allocated social worker, the child's school or college, and any employer. Where a school has a designated safeguarding lead under the Children and Young Persons Act 2008, that person's contact details belong in the case record too.

Care, protection and safety information is the part most directly connected to daily practice. It covers the date and circumstances of every occasion a child goes missing from the home, including what is known about their whereabouts during the absence, the date and circumstances of any use of a measure of control, discipline or restraint, and the arrangements and any restrictions on contact between the child, their parents, and anyone else.

Plans and reports require a copy of any EHC plan or statement of special educational needs, every school report received while the child is accommodated, a copy of the placing authority's care plan and the home's placement plan, and the date and result of any review of either.

Health matters cover the child's GP and dental practitioner, details of any accident or serious illness while accommodated, details of immunisations, allergies, medical examinations, and any medical or dental treatment, details of any health examination or developmental check connected to school, details of medicines kept for the child including self-administration, administration and disposal, and any special dietary or health needs.

None of this is unfamiliar to a competent registered manager. Most of it already exists somewhere in a home's systems, in the placement plan, the health file, the incident log, the money and valuables record required by paragraph 7 of Schedule 3. What Regulation 36 asks is that it sits together as one case record, current and signed, not scattered across four systems that nobody has cross-checked since the child was admitted.

What Schedule 4 requires as "other records"

Schedule 4 is shorter than Schedule 3, and it is the part of record keeping most homes underinvest in, because none of it concerns an individual child's care.

A register of children showing, for every child who has passed through the home, the date of admission, the date they ceased to be accommodated, their address immediately before and on leaving, their placing authority, and the statutory provision under which they were accommodated. This is a single running document covering every child the home has ever had, not a case-by-case file.

A record of staff, showing for every person working at the home their full name, sex, date of birth, home address, relevant qualifications and experience, whether they work full-time or part-time and their average hours if part-time, and whether they reside at the home. A separate copy of the staff duty roster, alongside a record of the rosters actually worked, which is not always the same document once shift swaps and agency cover are accounted for.

A record of anyone else who resides or works at the home at any time and is not already captured in the children's register or the staff record, which in practice usually means contractors, students on placement, or family members living on site.

A record of all visitors, to the home and to individual children, including who visited and why.

A record of every fire drill or fire alarm test, with any deficiency identified in the procedure or the equipment, and what was done to fix it.

Records of all accounts kept in the home.

Compare that list against what most homes can produce without notice. The staff duty roster is usually there. The register of children, kept as one continuous document rather than reconstructed from admission paperwork, often is not. Neither is a visitor log that covers visits to children specifically rather than a generic sign-in book at the front door, which misses exactly the detail Schedule 4 asks for.

Storage, access and retention

The three requirements sit in different places and are easy to conflate. Regulation 38 governs where documents are kept and whether they are accessible, including case records, Schedule 4 records, the statement of purpose, safeguarding and behaviour management policies, complaint records, and independent visitor and quality of care reports. It permits electronic storage explicitly, so a well-organised digital filing system satisfies it as well as a locked cabinet, provided the documents can actually be produced when asked for.

Retention is a separate matter and the two regulations set very different clocks. Case records under Regulation 36 are kept for 75 years from the child's date of birth, or 15 years from death if the child dies before 18, which in practice means most homes will never dispose of a case record within the working life of anyone currently employed there. Schedule 4 records under Regulation 37 have a much shorter minimum: 15 years from the date of the last entry, which for a register of children or a fire drill log means the clock resets every time something is added.

Location matters too. Regulation 36 requires case records to be kept securely in the home while the child is accommodated there, moving to a secure place afterwards. If a home closes, the case records do not simply archive with the provider. They transfer, either to another home the same provider runs, or to the child's placing authority, or to whichever local authority holds responsibility for the child's EHC plan or special educational needs statement. A home planning a closure needs to know which of those applies to every child on its register, not work it out during the closure itself.

Why Regulation 37 records are the ones that go missing

The reason for the asymmetry is not carelessness. It is that case records are built into the rhythm of care planning, and Schedule 4 records are not built into anyone's job description in the same way.

A registered manager reviews placement plans, reads incident logs, and signs off health information because those tasks are inseparable from looking after a specific child. A register of children spanning every admission the home has ever had, a fire drill record with deficiencies tracked to resolution, an accounts record, none of that happens as a side effect of caring for a child today. It happens only if someone has been given the job of maintaining it, and in a small home that job often has no clear owner.

Take a composite scenario, not drawn from any real home, that illustrates the pattern. A home has run for six years under one registered manager. Case records for every child, past and present, are complete, signed, and up to date, because the manager reviews them personally. Asked for the Schedule 4 register of children, the home produces admission paperwork for the four children currently placed and nothing for the eleven who have left, because no one ever consolidated admissions into a single running register. Asked for the fire drill record, the home produces a folder of test certificates from the alarm company, which shows the alarm was tested, not that a drill took place or that any deficiency identified was tracked to a fix, which is what paragraph 6 of Schedule 4 actually asks for.

Neither gap reflects a badly run home. Both reflect a manager who has been trained, correctly, to think in terms of individual children, applied to a duty that is explicitly not about individual children. The fix is not more diligence on case records. It is recognising that Schedule 4 needs its own checklist and its own named owner, separate from the systems built around care planning.

Who should own which record

In a well-run home, case records and Schedule 4 records rarely have the same owner, and that split is deliberate rather than accidental.

Case records sit naturally with whoever holds day-to-day responsibility for each child, usually the key worker feeding into records the registered manager reviews and signs off. That structure exists already in most homes because it mirrors how care is delivered.

Schedule 4 records do not map onto any child-facing role, which is exactly why they get missed. The register of children, the staff record, and the accounts sit more naturally with whoever manages the home's administration, whether that is the registered manager directly in a small provider or a business manager in a larger group. Fire drill records usually sit with whoever holds health and safety responsibility, which is not always the same person as the registered manager. Visitor records need a system that operates at the point of contact, at reception or with whoever is on duty when a visitor arrives, rather than being reconstructed afterwards.

What matters is that someone is named against each Schedule 4 category, with a defined point at which it gets checked. A registered manager who can say who owns the register of children and when it was last reconciled against actual admissions is in a materially stronger position than one who assumes it exists because case records are strong.

Record-keeping readiness checklist

Experiences and progress of children

Does every current child have a case record that includes the full range Schedule 3 lists, not only the placement plan and the most recent incident?

Is the register of children up to date for every child who has left the home in the past year, not only those currently accommodated?

Are records of missing episodes, restraint, and contact restrictions written up in the case record at the time, rather than reconstructed from memory weeks later?

How well children are helped and protected

Does the visitor record actually capture visits to individual children, alongside who visits the building generally?

Is the fire drill record showing deficiencies identified and the action taken to resolve them, not only that a test occurred?

Does the staff record show who is on duty and whether their supervision arrangements, including for agency and bank staff, connect to what the roster shows actually happened?

Effectiveness of leaders and managers

Is there a named owner for each category in Schedule 4, distinct from whoever is responsible for case records?

Can the home produce the register of children, the staff record, and the accounts record without notice, in the same way it can produce a case record?

Are case records and Schedule 4 records both kept in an accessible manner under Regulation 38, whether on paper or electronically, and can that be demonstrated on request?

If a home were to close tomorrow, does the registered manager know which local authority or receiving home each child's case record would transfer to?

What happens when Ofsted asks to see these records

Inspectors sample. They do not read every case record and every Schedule 4 record on every inspection, but they ask for specific documents, often with little notice, and how quickly and completely a home produces them is itself part of what is being assessed.

A case record request is usually targeted: a named child, sometimes connected to a specific incident or a recent Regulation 45 review. A Schedule 4 request is more likely to be broad: the register of children, the fire drill record, the visitor log for a given period. Because Schedule 4 records are rarely reviewed internally in the way case records are, they are also more likely to reveal a gap the home did not know it had, not because the information was hidden, but because nobody had checked whether it existed in the form the regulation actually requires.

What inspectors read into a gap depends on how the home responds to it. A registered manager who can say precisely what is missing and why, and who has already identified the gap before being asked, is read very differently from one discovering the gap for the first time during the inspection. The SCCIF assesses leadership and management directly, and knowing your own record-keeping position, including its weak points, is itself evidence of that standard being met.

Most common record-keeping failures

  • A register of children that only covers current placements. Schedule 4 requires the register to show admission and departure information for every child who has passed through the home, not only those there now.
  • Fire drill records that show testing but not deficiency and remedy. A certificate from an alarm contractor is not the same as the record paragraph 6 of Schedule 4 requires.
  • Visitor logs that capture the building, not the child. A front-desk sign-in sheet misses the specific requirement to record visits to individual children.
  • Case records missing the Schedule 3 categories nobody thinks to check. Money and valuables entries, the statutory provision under which a child is accommodated, and details of any employer are all listed and all commonly absent.
  • No named owner for Schedule 4 categories. When no one is accountable for the register, the staff record, or the accounts, each only gets attention when someone asks for it.
  • Records that exist but are not accessible. Regulation 38 requires an accessible manner, and a record buried in an unlabelled archive or a former manager's personal files does not meet that bar even if it technically exists somewhere.
  • No plan for what happens to case records if the home closes. Regulation 36 sets out exactly where records must go, and working that out during closure rather than in advance risks records going astray at the point children most need continuity.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Regulation 36 and Regulation 37? Regulation 36 requires a case record for each child, covering the information listed in Schedule 3. Regulation 37 requires a separate set of records about the home itself, covering the register of children, staff records, visitor logs, fire drills and accounts listed in Schedule 4.

How long must a child's case record be kept? Regulation 36 requires case records to be kept for 75 years from the child's date of birth, or for 15 years from the date of death if the child dies before turning 18, whichever applies.

How long must Schedule 4 records be kept? Regulation 37 requires the records in Schedule 4, including the register of children, staff records and fire drill records, to be retained for at least 15 years from the date of the last entry.

Can children's home records be kept electronically? Yes. Regulation 38 explicitly permits case records, Schedule 4 records and the other listed documents to be kept in electronic form, provided they are kept in an accessible manner.

What must be included in the register of children under Schedule 4? For every child, the date of admission, the date the child ceased to be accommodated, their address immediately before and on leaving the home, their placing authority, and the statutory provision under which they were accommodated.

Does a fire alarm test certificate satisfy the Schedule 4 fire drill record requirement? Not on its own. Paragraph 6 of Schedule 4 requires a record of every drill or test conducted, including details of any deficiency in the procedure or equipment and the steps taken to remedy it, which a contractor's test certificate does not usually capture.

What happens to case records if a children's home closes? Regulation 36 sets out a transfer route. Records go to another home the same provider runs where one exists, or otherwise to the child's placing authority, or to the local authority responsible for the child's EHC plan or special educational needs statement.

Who is responsible for maintaining Schedule 4 records in a children's home? The regulations place the duty on the registered person, but in practice most homes need a named individual for each Schedule 4 category, since none of these records map naturally onto a single child-facing role in the way case records do.

Does the staff duty roster need to be kept separately from the actual hours worked? Yes. Paragraph 3 of Schedule 4 requires both a copy of the staff duty roster and a record of the rosters actually worked, which are not always identical once shift swaps and cover are accounted for.

Is a general visitor sign-in book enough to meet the Schedule 4 requirement? Not fully. Schedule 4 requires a record of visitors to the home and to individual children, including the reason for the visit, so a sign-in book that only logs arrival at the building misses the child-specific detail the regulation asks for.

Related reading

How CareClarity supports your record keeping

CareClarity's Document Review reviews case record content staff have already written, such as placement plans, health information and incident entries, and gives RAG-rated feedback against the 9 Quality Standards and the SCCIF framework. It does not write, generate or maintain the record for you, and it does not cover the administrative Schedule 4 records, which stay a manual, named responsibility. What it does is catch a gap in what has already been written before an inspector does.

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