Terms

The terms for using this website, and the key terms on which the Hearth service is offered. The full service agreement, including the data processing agreement, is provided in writing before any home starts using Hearth.

Using this website

• The content on this site, including the Ofsted inspection guide, is general information for children’s residential homes in England. It is not regulatory or legal advice; always check the current regulations and guidance on GOV.UK.
• Please don’t submit information about children through this website, and don’t attempt to access accounts or data that aren’t yours. Sign-in is for onboarded customers only.
• How we handle data you give us here is covered by our privacy notice.

How the service is offered: the key terms

Billing you can leave

• Pricing is per home, per month, by the size bands shown on the pricing section, excluding VAT. An annual option exists for a discount but is never required.
• No minimum term and no exit fee. Cancel any month; the service runs to the end of the period you’ve paid for.
• Every plan includes the full product. Nothing statutory is gated by price band. A 3-bed home gets the same Regulation 40 drafting, Regulation 44 support, medication records and audit trail as a 10-bed home.
• If a subscription lapses, the block applies to creating new records only. Reading your existing records and exporting your evidence is never gated. Statutory records are not held hostage over a payment issue.

Your data stays yours

• Your organisation is the data controller of its records. Hearth processes them only on your instructions, under a written Article 28 data processing agreement signed before onboarding.
• You can export your records at any time, including PDF evidence packs, without asking us.
• If you leave, or if Hearth ever ceased trading, you get a full export of all your records and reasonable assistance moving out. Children’s records are preserved in line with statutory retention throughout; they are never deleted because a contract ended.
• We never use your records for advertising, resale, or training AI models.

Migration in

• We migrate your historical records from your current system, free, as part of onboarding.
• Migrated records keep their original dates and authorship and are marked as imported, so your audit trail stays honest in front of an inspector.

AI features

• AI output is draft-only: it never files or submits a record on its own, and a person always reviews and signs off.
• AI features are off by default and only enabled for your home once the data-protection paperwork covering the AI provider is in place with you. You can keep them off entirely. The price doesn’t change.
• Hearth is a recording tool. It does not make care decisions, and responsibility for the content of records, notifications and regulatory submissions stays with the registered person, which is exactly where the regulations put it.

Our responsibilities

• We keep the service secure as described in the security overview, notify you without undue delay of any personal-data breach affecting your records, and give you the audit trail to see who recorded and viewed what.
• We give notice before adding or changing subprocessors so you can object on reasonable grounds.

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