This is the second issue. Once a month it does two things: tells you what actually happened at CareClarity, including the parts that did not go to plan, and covers what changed in the regulations you work to. This one covers August.
What shipped
Four more guidance articles, keeping the weekly Tuesday cadence: Children's Home Daily Logs: What to Include, Staff Supervision in Children's Homes: Reg 33, Assessing a Referral for a Children's Home, and Why Children's Residential Homes Fail Ofsted. That takes the library to fourteen.
The bigger change is on the tool pages. All seven now carry a worked example: a full document, and the review CareClarity returned for it, copied out unedited. Not a summary and not marketing copy. The actual output, including the parts that are unflattering to us.
They are worth reading for what they caught. In a supervision record that reads perfectly well on a first pass, another manager's name appears twice, carried over from someone else's record, and the sign-off is blank. A Regulation 45 review is dated on its front page before the period it covers had finished. A Statement of Purpose scores 12.5 out of 22 against Schedule 1, and the reason is not the philosophy. It is four people in the staff table with somebody else's biography beside their name.
Every document in those examples is fictional, written for the purpose. We are not going to put a real home's records on a marketing page, and that is a decision rather than a limitation we are working around.
If you want to read one without signing in to anything, there is a single page for it: the record first, then what CareClarity found in it.
The Regulation 44 Action Planner
Last issue said to expect an update. Here it is, and it is not much of one.
The Action Planner is built and running. It takes a completed independent visitor's report and turns the recommendations into an action plan you can complete, print and keep as evidence. It organises the visitor's findings; it does not assess the visitor's report, which is not our place.
It is also still restricted to our own admin accounts while we test it. No organisation has access yet, which is the same position as a month ago. That is the honest answer rather than a comfortable one.
The mistake was announcing it at all before it was ready to hand over. When it opens to accounts you will find it in your tools list, and you will read about it here afterwards rather than beforehand.
What happens to your documents
Two changes worth knowing about, both in the direction of holding less.
Documents you paste in are still never stored. That has been true since launch and it has not changed. What has changed is everything around it: reviews, logs and account records now have defined retention periods rather than sitting in the database indefinitely, and they are deleted automatically when those periods run out.
Free accounts that have not been signed into for six months are now closed and their data removed. Nobody will lose an account without warning. You get an email at four months, another at five, and a final one a week before anything happens, and signing in at any point stops the clock.
We have also put a single page up answering the six questions we actually get asked about this: where the data sits, who can see it, what the AI provider does with it, and how long any of it lasts.
Ofsted is consulting on how it inspects you
Ofsted is running a 12-week consultation on how it inspects children's social care. It closes on 28 September, and it is not only about local authorities: it covers the SCCIF, which is the framework your home is inspected under. Ofsted lists children's homes, secure children's homes and supported accommodation among the providers affected.
The proposal that matters most to a children's home is this one:
we are proposing to remove the 'overall experiences and progress' judgement, so that each evaluation area is graded independently.
Ofsted adds that "No grade would automatically affect another."
If that lands, a single weak evaluation area stops pulling a whole inspection outcome down with it, and a strong one stops carrying a weak one. Whether that reads as good or bad news depends entirely on your home, which is why it is worth reading for yourself rather than waiting to be told what it meant.
There is a practical consequence either way. If each area is graded on its own evidence, the evidence for each area has to stand on its own, and a strong area can no longer carry a thin one across the line. That is a recording question before it is a practice one.
Responses close at 11:59pm on 28 September 2026. The consultation is here.
From Ofsted this month
Separately, on 18 August, Ofsted published its regulatory activity figures for children's homes, covering 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026. Every figure below is quoted from that report.
The headline is a staffing one, and it moved the wrong way:
As at 31 March 2026, 970 (20%) children's homes in England that were active or suspended no longer had a registered manager in post. Last year, the figure was 740 (19%).
On regulatory activity, Ofsted investigated 3,440 cases relating to 1,990 children's homes, and issued 650 compliance notices to 250 providers. Enforcement action across the year came to 140 restrictions of accommodation, 62 suspensions and 8 notices of cancellation.
The number we keep coming back to is a different one. Ofsted received 55,800 notifications from children's homes in the year, and the single most common classification, at 59% of all notification reasons, was "other incident relating to a child which the registered person considers to be serious".
Nearly three in five notifications land in the category that describes itself least. That is not a criticism of the homes making them: Regulation 40 requires notification without delay, and when something serious happens at 2am the honest classification often is "other". But it does mean the written detail inside those notifications is doing all the work of explaining what happened, and it is read later by someone who was not there.
One caveat worth stating plainly, because it limits what the report can tell you: it publishes the number of compliance notices but not the reasons for them, and it does not say which regulations were most often breached. Anyone telling you what homes are most commonly cited for this year is not getting it from this document.
You can read Ofsted's figures in full, and we will follow this with a guidance article on what the notification figures mean for how you write one.
One thing to check this month
Ten minutes, no sign-up, and useful whether or not you ever use CareClarity.
Open your last three Regulation 40 notifications and read only the written detail, ignoring the classification you filed them under. Ask whether someone who was not in the building could reconstruct what happened, what was decided, and why it was decided that way.
The reason this is worth doing is the 59% figure above. When most notifications are filed as "other incident relating to a child which the registered person considers to be serious", the category is telling the reader almost nothing and the written detail is carrying the entire explanation. It is read weeks later by an inspector who was not there, and who has only your words to go on.
The structural problem is that the person best placed to judge whether a record explains itself is usually the person who wrote it, and they already know what happened. That is the gap Document Review and Daily Log Review exist to close. Do the check with your own eyes first though. It costs nothing and it will tell you whether you need anything else.
Dates worth having in the diary
- 28 September 2026, 11:59pm. Ofsted's consultation on inspecting children's social care closes. It covers the SCCIF, so it covers your home.
That is the only date we have for you this month. This section lists what is coming rather than what has happened, and it will be short or missing in months when nothing is.
What is next
The weekly article continues. Beyond that we are deliberately not announcing anything, for the reason above.
If there is something you want covered here, reply to this email and say so. This is still a young publication and it will shape around what is useful to the people reading it.