CHARMS - Safe, Secure, Always Accessible

CHARMS has been developed in the UK and is hosted in the UK on a private cloud in datacentres provided by our partner, UKFast. UKFast are ISO27001 accredited and work closely with our team at SCN to offer complete security for our customers. Data security is paramount and backups are only stored in the UK; our developers are all UK based and all our staff are enhanced DBS checked.

CHARMS - Children's Residential

The fastest growing CHARMS community is children's residential. If you need a secure, online system to manage all the young people's case records look no further than CHARMS - it does all that you need. Care workers complete their logs quickly and easily; care home managers can see what is going on instantly; and now, looked after young people can keep their own recordings safe using the CHARMS Young People App.

CHARMS - Adoption

The Education and Adoption Act 2016 placed a responsibility on local authority adoption services and voluntary adoption agencies to work together to establish Regional Adoption Agencies (RAAs) in England. CHARMS has been the mainstay of the adoption community for 2 decades and is now the system of choice for 5 of the first group of RAAs.

30 of the 35 Voluntary Adoption Agencies in Wales, England and Scotland use CHARMS.

CHARMS helps them all to make sure that sensitive case records are kept safe.

CHARMS - Fostering

Across the UK and Ireland some 250+ independent fostering providers and local authority fostering teams use CHARMS on a day to day basis. They can manage every aspect of the foster carer recruitment, training, assessment and approval process. Post approval, thousands of foster carers use CHARMS to record their daily logs and to communicate, securely, with their link worker. Looked after young people can also now login to CHARMS to keep their own "life story" and to share information with their carers and social workers. Panel members, assessors and all other stakeholders can login to CHARMS to access everything they need in the safest possible way.

Supporting the Care Community

SCN operates on the basis that IT systems should be seen as tools to help deliver care - not as a burden.

SCN is, and always will be privately owned. We are in the process of converting to an Employee Owned Trust so that all staff and customers are part of the CHARMS community. There's that word again.

What it means for SCN and CHARMS is that everyone - employees, customers, suppliers and, most importantly, users of CHARMS, have a say in what CHARMS does and what it needs to do.

We do not make money from CHARMS. All income is ploughed back in. As majority owner of the company, my salary is capped at around twice the average of all staff. We do not pay dividends.

Those of us that work at SCN want to make using IT systems as easy as possible for social workers, care staff, foster carers, adopters, managers, admin staff, assessors, panel members, trustees, volunteers and anyone else who has a stake in the care of people.

We really do want to make CHARMS something which all of our users enjoy creating, using and developing.

If we ask the question "does CHARMS work for you - the practitioners?", the answer must be yes. If you feel otherwise, tell your account manager and we will change it.

We welcome your views, however critical. Compliments are welcome, as well, of course.

Jim Moores, Managing Director

CHARMS - Adults

SCN's dedicated supported employment system, ASSET, and CHARMS have now been merged and CHARMS offers the adult care community a unique, ground-breaking system to manage service user records in any care setting. Lancashire CC Shared Lives Service has been a fantastic user of CHARMS for many years and through their commitment to using a secure, online records management system and their collaboration with our team at SCN we now have a system which can be help to save time across all providers. Services include supported employment, outreach, semi-independence, residential care, mental health services and many more.

CHARMS - User stats