How do you evidence a relationship?

Ofsted is consulting on changing how it inspects children's social care. In the proposals for the SCCIF there's a new evaluation area, listed in the document as "children's enduring relationships (new)".

Not safeguarding. Not leadership. Relationships — the thing every good residential worker already knows is the actual job, proposed as something inspectors would grade you on.

It's the right instinct. It also raises a fairly uncomfortable practical question, which is the one in the title.

The caveat first

This is a proposal, not a rule. The consultation opened on 7 July and closes at 11:59pm on 28 September 2026. Ofsted's document says SCCIF changes "will be implemented on a phased basis between spring 2027 and spring 2028", with a full timeline for each remit to follow after the consultation closes.

So nothing changes on Monday. But "we've got eighteen months" only helps if the thing you'd need to build takes less than eighteen months — and evidence of a relationship is, by definition, gathered over time.

The gap between what you do and what you can show

Here's the awkward truth about care recording as most services experience it. The daily log gets written for the regulator. Someone sits down at the end of a shift, tired, and writes what happened — usually the incidents, because incidents feel like the thing that needs recording.

So you end up with a record that reads like a charge sheet. Six months of a child's life, and the written history is a list of the days it went wrong.

Then someone asks how you know a young person is forming lasting, trusting bonds with the adults around them, and the honest answer — "because we can see it" — isn't evidence. It's a feeling. A well-founded feeling, held by people who've earned the right to it. But not evidence.

That gap is the whole reason Leafnotes exists.

The same question, in supported housing

Worth reading the two together, because they rhyme.

The government's response on supported housing regulation confirms licensing will be "extended to mirror the definition of 'supported exempt accommodation' in section 12 of the Supported Housing Act" — wider than the sub-set originally proposed. There are six categories of exemption, including one that will matter to a lot of readers here: supported housing "containing at least one Ofsted-regulated bed, for residents aged up to 25 years old".

None of it is in force. The response says "MHCLG expect to consult on their regulations in late 2026" before regulations are laid.

But there's a small edit in the draft standards I keep coming back to. The requirement to provide the same support worker "will be amended to a requirement for the resident to receive consistent support."

Whoever wrote that understands the sector — it's realistic about rotas in a way policy documents usually aren't. It also quietly shifts the burden from one named person to a team, behaving consistently, over months. Which lands you in the same place as Ofsted: something real and obvious to anyone standing in the building, and genuinely hard to show on paper.

The small stuff is the evidence

Slightly odd hill for a software company to die on, but here goes.

The best care records I've read didn't feel like compliance. They read like someone was paying attention. A support worker noting that a young man asked her about her weekend for the first time. A key worker recording that a resident with dementia hummed along to a song, and that it was the third time that month.

None of that is an incident. All of it is evidence. Evidence of relationship, of consistency, of a service where somebody noticed.

The reason recording feels like a chore is almost never that staff don't care. It's that the tools make it one — clunky forms, duplicate entry, twenty minutes of typing after a twelve-hour shift, and no sense that anyone will ever read it back. So people record the minimum, and the minimum is incidents.

Reduce the friction and the record changes character. Make it quick to capture the small stuff and six months later you don't have a charge sheet, you have a story. The useful part is that the story is also the evidence. You don't have to choose between them.

So — could you show someone the relationships in your service? Or would you need them to take your word for it?

That question is already live, whether or not this particular proposal survives the consultation. It closes on 28 September, and it's worth twenty minutes of your time: you can read the proposals and respond here.

Our mission is that the proving shouldn't cost you the caring.