--- title: "Messaging for residential children's homes | Socialheads" url: https://socialheads.co.uk/use-cases/childrens-homes/ --- # Messaging built for residential children's homes Give staff and young people a dedicated place to stay in touch without exchanging personal numbers, and keep the communication record with the home when workers change. ## The home A small house, a handful of young people, and a staff team working shifts around them. Relationships are the work. A young person who trusts their key worker will say things they would never write in a form. The registered manager carries the accountability for all of it: the quality of care, the records, what the home can evidence when Ofsted arrives, and what an independent person finds on a Regulation 44 visit. In Scotland, the Care Inspectorate carries the same expectations. Staff turnover is a fact of the sector. When a key worker moves on, what they knew tends to leave with them. ## How it usually works today Start with the staff team, because that is where most homes feel it first. There is a WhatsApp group. Handovers happen in it, someone flags that a young person has had a hard night, names and photographs go in it, and it lives on everyone's personal phone. It exists because a team working shifts needs something instant, and nothing the home provided was. Then there is contact with the young people themselves. A young person is out with friends, or at college, or has run. Staff need to reach them. So a worker uses their own phone. It happened for a reason. A young person answers a WhatsApp message and does not answer a letter, and for years nobody offered anything better. The tool that worked was the one already in everyone's pocket. The trouble arrives afterwards. The conversation lives on a personal handset, outside the home's control. A worker's personal number is now a looked-after child's contact. When that worker leaves, the messages leave too. And when someone asks what was said and when, the honest answer is often that nobody can be sure. ## What a home actually needs Before any product, this is the requirement. It is the list we built to. - Staff can reach young people without giving out a personal number, and without buying everyone a work phone. - A young person can take part without needing their own device or a bank card. - The record belongs to the home, not the handset, and survives a worker leaving. - A message cannot be deleted once it has been sent, by anyone. - A safeguarding lead can look when there is a real reason, and that look is itself recorded. - The manager can produce a young person's communication history without spending an evening screenshotting phones. ## How Socialheads fits For the staff team, it replaces the group chat: shift handovers and day to day coordination in named group conversations, on the phones people already carry, with the home owning the record and access ending the day someone leaves. Homes can start here alone, on Core, without any young person being in the system. Where a home extends it to young people, conversations are staff-led: only staff can start one. Depending on how your home works, conversations are either assigned to a named key worker or open to any staff member on shift. That is configurable, because homes run differently. Nobody exchanges a phone number. Staff use their own device with a professional account, and a young person reaches their conversation in a web browser, so taking part does not depend on owning a phone or having a card to set up an app store account. They can pick it up from a shared device in the home, or a computer at college. Photos and documents travel inside the same conversation and land in the same record. A young person can always flag a message that worries them, and it goes to the right person. When a key worker changes, the conversation follows the young person to the new worker, and the previous worker keeps read-only access to their own history rather than losing it or taking it with them. A young person does not have to tell a difficult story twice because the new person on shift has no idea what was said. ## What you can evidence Every message, attachment and action is time stamped as it happens, so the record builds itself while people work rather than being assembled afterwards. Access is limited to named roles. When a safeguarding lead needs to read a conversation there is a deliberate route to do it, and that access is itself recorded, so you can always show who looked, when, and why. When an inspector, an independent visitor on a Regulation 44 visit, or a case review asks what contact a young person has had, you can produce it in minutes rather than gathering it from people's phones. ## Where it stops Socialheads is not a care record and does not replace your recording system. It does not write daily logs, hold placement plans or manage incidents. Where something said in a conversation becomes a safeguarding concern, it belongs in your recording system, and we give you the record to attach to it. It does not monitor devices, browsing or other apps. It governs one channel: the one between your staff and the young people you look after. And it does not make your home compliant. Your home is the data controller and we act as your processor. Compliance rests on your policies, your practice and your people. Your duties stay yours. We support them and give you the evidence. ## What changes for the young person They get a way of talking to the adults in their life that looks and feels like the apps they already use, rather than something built for a filing cabinet. They are told plainly how it works: who can see what, when a safeguarding lead might read a conversation, and that the record stays with the home. Everything they are told up front holds later. And when a worker they trust moves on, the relationship does not restart from nothing. The next person knows what has already been said. For a young person who has repeated their story to a lot of adults, that is not a small thing. ## Putting it in Socialheads sits alongside what you already run. Staff keep their own phones. Your recording system stays where it is. You will want to update your communications policy so it is clear that professional contact happens here rather than on personal numbers, and to talk it through with young people rather than announcing it. We will help with your data protection impact assessment and provide the processing agreement, security overview and subprocessor list your data protection review will ask for. If this is the gap in your home, the next step is a conversation about how you work. [Get started](/get-started) [See plans and pricing](/pricing) Wondering what the lost time adds up to? [Try the impact calculator](/impact#calculator).