The Placement You Should Have Said No To

It arrives at four o'clock on a Friday. A referral, a bed that has been empty for three weeks, and a placing authority that needs an answer by five.

You read the paperwork. It is thin. There is a reference to an incident in the last placement with no detail attached. The age fits. The bed is there. Someone on the team says they will make it work.

You say yes.

Six weeks later two children are absent from the home more often than they are in it, a member of staff has resigned, and the young person who had been settled for a year has started going missing again. Nobody made a bad decision out of carelessness. The decision was made in forty minutes, on partial information, under commercial pressure, and nowhere in your records is there a document explaining why you believed it would work.

That last part is what an inspector will find.

What the regulation actually says

Regulation 14(2)(a) of the Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015 is short and unambiguous. The registered person must ensure that:

"children are admitted to the home only if their needs are within the range of needs of children for whom it is intended that the home is to provide care"

Two things follow from that sentence, and providers routinely miss the second.

The first is the obvious one. You must know what your home is for. That range of needs is not something you decide at the point of referral. It is set out in your statement of purpose, because paragraph 1 of Schedule 1 requires a statement of the range of needs of the children for whom the home is intended to provide care, and paragraph 22 requires any criteria used for admission, including the policy for emergency admissions.

The second is harder. If you accept a child outside that range, you have not simply made a difficult judgement call. You have breached a regulation, and you have done it in writing, because the statement of purpose is the document you filed with Ofsted.

Matching is about three people, not one

Most matching paperwork looks at the referred child. That is one third of the question.

Can we meet this child's needs? The obvious one. Their care plan, their history, their risks, what has worked and what has failed before.

What does this child's arrival do to the children already living here? This is the question that gets skipped, and it is the one that causes the damage. A child whose needs you can absolutely meet may still be the wrong admission this month, because of who is already in the house, what happened last week, or which two young people cannot be left in a room together.

Can this staff team do it, with this rota, right now? Regulation 13(2)(c) requires the registered person to ensure that staff have the experience, qualifications and skills to meet the needs of each child. A team that could manage a placement in March may not be the team you have in September.

A home that assesses only the first question is doing a needs assessment. Matching is all three.

The document that does not legally exist

Here is something you will not read on most template websites selling matching packs.

There is no statutory requirement for a document called an impact risk assessment. Search the 2015 Regulations and you will not find the phrase.

What you will find is Regulation 12, the protection of children standard, which requires the registered person to ensure that staff assess whether each child is at risk of harm and that day to day care is arranged to keep each child safe. You will find Regulation 11, which requires children to be helped to build and maintain positive relationships. And you will find the Guide to the Children's Homes Regulations, which says at paragraph 8.3 that homes "should work closely with the placing authority to understand the child's relationship history and the impact that the child's arrival may have on the group living in the home."

So the assessment is not optional. The form is. What the regulations require is that you can demonstrate you considered the impact, and the only way to demonstrate it is to have written it down at the time.

That distinction matters, because it changes what a good matching record looks like. It is not a form to be completed for the file. It is the evidence of a decision.

Emergency admissions are not an exemption

The pressure to say yes is strongest when there is no time to think, which is exactly when the guidance is most specific.

Paragraph 3.6 of the Guide states that emergency admissions "should not be taken unless the home's Statement of Purpose and its capacity and support systems mean that it has the capability to care for children admitted at very short notice while continuing to offer high quality care to children already living in the home."

Read the last clause again. The test is not whether you can accommodate the new child. It is whether you can do that and continue to provide high quality care to the children already there. If your statement of purpose does not describe an emergency admission capability, you have told Ofsted you do not offer one.

Saying no is evidence of good practice

Providers worry that declining referrals damages the relationship with commissioners. In our experience the opposite is true, and it is certainly true at inspection.

A home that has declined three referrals in a year, each with a recorded reason, is demonstrating that it knows what it is for. A home that has accepted everything is demonstrating that it does not. The first conversation goes well. The second one goes somewhere you do not want it to go, particularly when an inspector connects a run of placement breakdowns to a run of admissions nobody assessed.

Keep the declines. They are not a record of lost income. They are the clearest evidence you will ever produce that your matching process is real.

What to check this week

Pull the file for your most recent admission and look for four things.

Is there a written record of why this child was matched to this home, dated before the admission rather than after it? Does it say anything about the children already living there? Does it reference the range of needs in your statement of purpose? And if the placement has since ended early, is there anything connecting the two?

If you cannot find that record, the practice may still have been sound. You simply cannot prove it. And at inspection, under the current framework and under the one Ofsted has proposed to replace it, the difference between good practice and unevidenced practice is the difference between two grades.

If you want your matching process looked at properly, or your admissions paperwork rebuilt so it records the decision rather than describing the child, get in touch. It is a great deal cheaper than a placement breakdown.