Socialheads
Messaging built for
leaving care teams
Keep in touch with care leavers without depending on a phone number that changes, and keep a record of contact for pathway plan reviews.
The work
A personal adviser, or a throughcare and aftercare worker, holds a relationship with a young person who has left care. The plan it runs through, and the age support reaches, are set by the framework you work under.
Every local authority is a corporate parent, and the corporate parenting principles in the Children and Social Work Act 2017 shape how that duty is meant to be carried out. The local offer is where it becomes something a care leaver can actually see and use.
Most of it comes down to one unglamorous thing: staying in touch with someone who is now living independently, may have moved several times, and may not want to feel like a case.
Why staying in touch is hard
Two versions of the same problem. Within the team, personal advisers working across a patch coordinate on a WhatsApp group that carries care leavers' names and circumstances on personal phones. That one is solved by moving the team conversation somewhere the authority owns, and a service can start there alone.
The harder one is contact with the care leaver, which usually depends on a mobile number. And a care leaver's number is one of the least stable things about their life. A phone gets lost, sold, broken or stolen. A SIM runs out. A number changes and nobody tells the local authority.
Then a personal adviser is ringing a dead number, sending letters to an address the young person left months ago, and recording another unsuccessful attempt at contact. The relationship did not break down. The route to it did.
There is a second problem underneath. When a personal adviser changes, and over several years they will, the young person often starts again with someone who knows only what is written in the file. People who have already told their story to a great many adults are asked to tell it once more.
What a leaving care service needs
This is the list we built to.
- Contact that survives a new phone, a new number or a new SIM.
- A young person can reach their adviser without holding a personal mobile number.
- Taking part does not require owning a phone or having a bank card.
- A record of contact that a pathway plan review can draw on, without an afternoon of reconstruction.
- Continuity when the personal adviser changes, so the young person is not starting again.
- Something that feels like keeping in touch rather than being case managed.
How Socialheads fits
For the staff team it replaces the group chat: named group conversations for a duty rota, a patch or a team of personal advisers, on the phones people already carry, owned by the service rather than by whoever happened to set the group up. A leaving care service can start there alone, on Core, with no young person in the system at all.
Where a service extends it to the young people it supports, contact is tied to an account rather than a SIM card. A young person who loses their phone or changes number signs in on another device and their conversation is still there, with the same adviser and the whole history, and the relationship carries on where it left off.
They reach it in a web browser, which matters here as much as anywhere. Setting up an app store account usually needs a payment method, and a care leaver managing on very little may not have a card, or a working handset that month. A library computer or a friend's phone is enough.
Nobody exchanges personal numbers. A personal adviser can hold a proper professional boundary while still being genuinely reachable, and when they move on, access ends with the job rather than following them out of the door.
When the adviser changes, the conversation follows the young person to the new one. The person picking it up can see what has already been said, so a care leaver does not have to explain their history to a stranger before they can ask about a housing form.
Evidencing contact
Keeping in touch is a duty, and one that has to be shown rather than asserted. Every message and action is time stamped as it happens, so attempts at contact, and what came of them, are recorded while the work is done.
When a plan is reviewed, or a service is asked how it keeps in touch with care leavers, the history is there to draw on rather than reconstruct.
Access to a conversation is limited to named roles, and where a safeguarding lead needs to read one there is a deliberate route, with that access itself recorded.
Four nations, four frameworks
Leaving care works differently across the UK. England and Wales run pathway plans with a personal adviser. Scotland has throughcare and aftercare, with Continuing Care letting a young person stay where they are. Northern Ireland has its own leaving care arrangements. The ages, the plan and the job titles all differ.
Socialheads holds none of that. It keeps the contact going and keeps a record of it, whichever framework the plan sits in, and the words on screen follow the ones your service uses.
Scotland and The Promise. The commitment that care-experienced young people will grow up loved, safe and respected sets a high bar, and one part of it is squarely ours: relationships should not be broken by things that have nothing to do with the young person. A changed number, a lost phone, a worker moving on. Keeping a relationship reachable through all three is a small contribution to a much bigger piece of work, and it is the part software can honestly help with.
What sits alongside it
Socialheads does not hold pathway plans, assessments or case records, and does not replace the system you keep them in. It gives you communication records to place alongside them.
It is not a local offer portal, a benefits calculator or a services directory. It is the conversation between a care leaver and the person supporting them.
And it does not make your authority compliant. You are the data controller and we act as your processor. Your duties stay yours. We support them and give you the evidence.
What changes for the care leaver
The person who has been there does not disappear because a phone did. That sounds small until you have lost the only number you had for someone who was helping you.
They can get in touch on their own terms, when something comes up, rather than waiting for a scheduled call or a letter. And they can see the history of what has been said, which is theirs as much as anyone's.
It looks like the apps they already use, because there is no good reason for support to feel like paperwork.
If keeping in touch through a changed number and a lost phone is the hard part of your work, the next step is a conversation about how your team works.
Wondering what the lost time adds up to? Try the impact calculator.