The staff file pack every children's home should already have.

What you get

The workbook. Ten tabs that do real work by themselves:

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• The Annex A staffing answers. Ofsted asks for exact staffing numbers on notice of a full inspection: new starters and leavers, agency shifts and agency people, part time, level 3, regulation 32, first aid, vacancies. Type your staff list once and Section 7 answers itself, question by question under the form's own numbers (form of 1 April 2026).
• Training matrix with instant answers. Type the date a course was done and the cell next to it fills in the expiry and turns green, amber or red by itself.
• Supervision tracker that flags who is overdue, including the manager.
• DBS re-check log that works out when each check is next due.
• Staff list with the regulation 32 status worked out for each person, and an agency shift log that counts shifts and people the way the form asks.
• Governance clocks: statement of purpose, policies, the monthly visit grid, all with next-due dates that compute themselves.
• The Schedule 2 staff file checklist, the employment gap worksheet, and the inspection self-audit.

The Inspection Playbook. Plain English: the Annex A staffing numbers and how to have them ready, the staff-side records inspections ask to see with the regulation behind each, what good looks like and what fails for each, the word-for-word script for the employment gap conversation, the reference verification call script, and how to run your own mock inspection in an hour.

The supervision record. A record for staff and a record for the manager's own supervision by the RI, with room to write, as Word to type into and as PDF.

Safer recruitment. The interview questions and the three probes that matter, the DBS self-declaration wording you may use, what goes in the file, and the first-month induction checklist.

Know it cold. No two inspections ask the same questions, but the facts a good answer uses are the same: the LADO, out of hours, where each child's missing plan is kept, when physical intervention is allowed here, your own training dates. A card to fill in for your home and pin in the staff room.

Opens in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice. Along with the pack you get the occasional short note on keeping inspection ready; reply once to stop them forever.

Where to start

Twenty minutes, today:

• Open the workbook. Read the Start here tab; it takes a minute.
• Put your staff names in the matrix and copy the dates from your old sheet. Watch the Expires cells colour themselves.
• Find the first red cell. Book that course. Just that one.

Fix the first red cell today.

It is free because every home needs it and most homes are too busy to build it.