Regulation 5: Engaging with the Wider System to Ensure Children's Needs Are Met

1. What Regulation 5 requires

Regulation 5 is built around four duties. First, the registered person must seek to involve each child's placing authority effectively in the child's care, in accordance with the child's relevant plans. Second, the registered person must seek to secure the input and services required to meet each child's needs. Third, if the registered person or staff consider the performance or response of the placing authority or a relevant person to be inadequate in relation to their role, the registered person must challenge that authority or person to seek to ensure the child's needs are met in accordance with relevant plans. Fourth, the registered person must seek to develop and maintain effective professional relationships with such persons, bodies or organisations as the registered person considers appropriate, having regard to the range of needs of children for whom it is intended that the home will provide care and accommodation.

The word 'seek' is important. The regulation does not require the home to force engagement or to guarantee that external agencies will respond. It requires the registered person to seek to engage others, to seek to secure services, and to escalate concerns when support is inadequate. The duty is to make genuine, documented efforts, not to achieve a guaranteed outcome that is partly outside the registered person's control.

2. The wider system and your role within it

The home is expected to work in close partnership with all those who play a role in protecting and caring for the child. This includes the child's local authority and statutory social worker, the placing authority, health services, education services, CAMHS, therapists, advocates, and any other relevant agency involved in the child's care.

The home must play a full part in promoting the child's best interests and proactively advocate for the child to ensure others deliver the high-quality support required. This means the home is not just a provider of accommodation. It is an active participant in a multi-agency care network.

Child-centred question

If a child needs a service that the home cannot provide, who is responsible for securing it, and what happens if that service is not delivered?

3. Working with placing authorities and relevant agencies

The placing authority is the local authority or organisation that placed the child. Under Regulation 5, the registered person must seek to involve the placing authority effectively in the child's care, in accordance with the child's relevant plans. This means maintaining clear, persistent communication about the child's needs, progress, and any gaps in service provision.

Effective involvement means more than sending notifications. It means engaging the placing authority in care planning, reviews, decisions about the child's future, and responses to incidents or changing needs. The home should ensure that the placing authority is aware of what the child needs and what the home cannot provide alone.

4. Escalation and challenge

If the registered person considers that the response of the placing authority or other relevant persons is inadequate, they must challenge them to ensure the child's needs are met in line with their relevant plans. The regulation does not require the home to force engagement, but it does require the registered person to take action to escalate concerns when necessary.

Escalation may involve: raising concerns directly with the placing authority or social worker; escalating to a manager or director within the placing authority; engaging the local authority where the home is located; using formal complaints procedures; contacting the child's advocate; or, where safeguarding is at risk, following safeguarding referral procedures. The home should document each step taken.

5. How Regulation 5 operates across the Quality Standards

Regulation 5 operates as an overarching requirement that supports the delivery of all nine Quality Standards. It ensures that the home does not operate in isolation but actively coordinates with the wider system to facilitate the specific outcomes required by the standards.

For example: the health and well-being standard (Regulation 10) may require the home to secure health services the home cannot provide itself. The education standard (Regulation 8) may require the home to engage with schools and the virtual school head. The protection of children standard (Regulation 12) may require the home to work with local safeguarding partners. The care planning standard (Regulation 14) requires alignment with the child's care plan, which is owned by the placing authority. In each case, Regulation 5 is the mechanism that connects the home's duties to the wider system's responsibilities.

6. What this means for providers, RIs and Registered Managers

Under Regulation 2, 'registered person' means the registered provider or the registered manager. The duty in Regulation 5 sits with the registered person. A Responsible Individual is not a registered person merely by being the RI. An RI may have organisational oversight responsibilities that include ensuring the home engages with the wider system, but this is governance oversight rather than the Regulation 5 statutory duty itself.

The Responsible Individual should ensure that the home has systems for tracking engagement with external agencies, that escalation is taking place where needed, and that the Registered Manager is supported in challenging inadequate responses. The Registered Manager is the operational lead for day-to-day engagement with placing authorities and external services.

7. Evidence and records

Evidence should demonstrate the home's efforts to achieve engagement and include records of actions taken to escalate concerns. This includes contemporaneous records such as: correspondence with placing authorities; meeting minutes; records of requests for services; documentation of challenges raised when support has been inadequate; and records of outcomes achieved through escalation.

Records do not need to be elaborate, but they should be specific. A note that says 'chased social worker' is less useful than a note that says 'emailed social worker on 15 March requesting CAMHS referral, no response received by 22 March, escalated to team manager on 23 March.' The purpose is to demonstrate that the home actively pursued the child's needs, not simply that the home logged that a need existed.

8. Related guidance

The following CHH guides cover related areas that connect to Regulation 5: