Socialheads
Messaging built for
supported accommodation
Stay in contact with 16 and 17 year olds between visits, without anyone handing out a personal number, and keep a record you can stand behind.
The setting
Supported accommodation is for looked-after children and care leavers aged 16 and 17 who are building independence, and who do not need the kind of environment a children's home provides.
The defining difference is staffing. Nobody is there around the clock. Support is planned visits, drop-ins and check-ins, and a lot of the relationship happens in the hours nobody is in the building.
They are also, in law, still children. The regulations are explicit that people in this setting should not be treated as young adults simply because they are living more independently.
How contact usually happens
Between staff, it is a WhatsApp group. In a service where people work alone across several properties, often at odd hours, the group chat is how anyone knows what is going on. It carries young people's names and situations, and it sits on personal phones outside the service's control.
With young people, it is a personal mobile. A support worker gives a young person their number so they can get hold of someone, and the young person texts or messages when they need to.
That arrangement exists because the alternative was nothing. A 16 year old on their own at nine in the evening is not going to email. Workers filled a real gap with the only tool they had.
But it leaves a support worker's personal number in the hands of a child they are responsible for, with no boundary when they are off shift or when they leave the job. The record of what was said sits on a private handset. And when the service needs to show how it has kept in touch and responded, it is piecing together screenshots.
What the service needs
This is the list we built to.
- A young person can reach the service when nobody is on site, without holding a worker's personal number.
- Workers can hold professional boundaries, including when they are off shift or move on.
- Taking part does not depend on the young person having their own phone or a bank card.
- Contact across several properties is visible to a manager without ringing round.
- A concern raised at ten at night reaches the right person.
- The service can evidence how it stays in touch, and what young people have said about it.
How Socialheads fits
For the staff team it replaces the group chat, which matters most where people work alone and across sites: named group conversations for a property, a patch or an on-call rota, on the phones staff already carry, owned by the service. A provider can start here on Core alone.
With young people, conversations are staff-led, so contact starts from the service rather than arriving unannounced. Nobody exchanges a phone number: workers use their own device with a professional account, and access ends the day someone leaves.
A young person reaches their conversation in a web browser, which matters in this setting more than most. App store accounts usually need a payment method attached, and a 16 year old moving toward independence may not have a bank card, or a phone that stays in one piece. They can pick up the conversation from a shared computer, a college machine or a friend's phone.
Group conversations work where a service wants several workers reachable rather than one named person, which suits rota-based support better than a single key worker model.
A young person can always flag a message that worries them, and it goes to the right person, and the flag itself is part of the record. For a service where the worrying message often arrives outside office hours, that matters.
Registration and inspection
In England, providers of supported accommodation have had to register with Ofsted since October 2023, and are inspected against the Quality Standards under the social care common inspection framework. In Scotland, housing support services register with the Care Inspectorate instead, and the same record answers the same questions.
Two things follow that we can help with directly. Inspection asks how a service keeps in touch and how it responds when something is raised, and a communication record answers that without an evening of gathering.
Providers also have to review the support they offer every six months, and that review has to include what the young people living there think. Where a lot of that conversation already happens in messages, the material for it is already in one place.
To be clear about the limit of that: the review is yours to write and the judgement is yours to make. We hold the record, not the responsibility.
What stays yours
Socialheads does not hold support plans, pathway plans or case records, and does not replace the system you use for them. It produces communication records you can attach.
It does not monitor a young person's device, their browsing or their other apps. It governs one channel, the one between your service and them.
And it does not make your service compliant. You are the data controller and we act as your processor. Your registration, your standards and your practice stay yours. We support them and give you the evidence.
What changes for the young person
They can get hold of someone without feeling they are bothering a particular worker on their personal phone, and without wondering whether that worker is even on shift.
They are told plainly how it works, including when a safeguarding lead might read a conversation and why. Someone building independence deserves to know the rules rather than discover them.
And when a worker moves on, which happens, the thread does not vanish with them. Continuity is often the thing this age group has had least of.
If keeping contact between visits is the gap, the next step is a conversation about how your service runs.
Wondering what the lost time adds up to? Try the impact calculator.