The Importance of Children’s Home Finding

Why Language, Perspective and Precision Matter in Home Finding Training – with Ashleigh Searle and CareCubed 

CareCubed is an innovative tool that helps to deliver data-driven, person-centred benchmarking into social care commissioning. An important part of the way the CareCubed team delivers services to organisations with this tool is through training. This training can assist in highlighting the additional processes that can be taken on board to drive positive outcomes for teams and individuals. At CareCubed, the tool is accompanied by these training sessions that can help organisations optimise the whole cycle of commissioning care. 

One of the critical training services provided by CareCubed is Ashleigh Searle’s Home Finding Training. This training helps commissioners adapt language models, referral processes and understand the experience of cared-for children within the Home Finding cycle. 

Why is Home Finding so Important?

Finding the right home for a child transitioning into care is one of the most consequential decisions any local authority will make when thinking about delivering care for a child. It is not simply a commissioning exercise or a process. When done well, it has the power to provide stability, safety, belonging and long-term positive outcomes. 
 
Yet Home Finding often takes place under pressure, with common themes across the sector of limited availability, escalating need, time constraints and enhanced financial scrutiny. In this environment, urgency can overtake depth and process can replace perspective. 
 
As part of CareCubed’s onboarding and development offer and commitment to improving practice nationally, Ashleigh Searle (Implementation and Innovation Manager) delivers specialist Home Finding Best Practice training to local authorities across the UK. Her approach combines commissioning expertise with a lens of lived experience, integrating a dual perspective to best practice across the sector. The focus is not only on what is being commissioned, but also on the reality of decision-making, policy and process for children on the ground. 

Commissioning with Visibility and Transparency

In her training sessions, Ashleigh poses a simple but disarming question to commissioners and social workers, putting forward an image of an ‘invisible car’ and asking if there are any buyers.   
 
“You wouldn’t purchase something in your own lives without understanding exactly what you are getting. You would want to know what is included and what it really looks like. So why do we often Home Find without the same level of visibility?” 
 
She puts forward a few key principles for all Home Finders to follow, asking officers to ask themselves; if they know what is core and what is additional, understand the difference between a therapeutic approach and therapeutic intervention, have visibility of background minimum safe staffing ratios to understand how many members of staff are working within homes before agreeing any additionality, and to ask themselves if they have enough information to clearly picture a full day in that service. 

Care Quality and then Cost

Benchmarking and transparency tools such as CareCubed strengthen cost analysis whilst ensuring that financial scrutiny is matched by a focus on the quality of care. “Right-sizing” a package is not about reducing spend; it is about ensuring that the level of provision precisely matches the child’s needs, with clarity about what is being delivered and why it is in the best interests of the child. Enhanced transparency does not create bureaucracy; it leads to informed decision-making that enhances working relationships and a shared understanding of need.

Where Effective Home Finding Begins: The Referral

Ashleigh is clear that successful Home Finding starts long before a provider is contacted. It begins with the quality of the referral. 
 
“The first referral is the referral”, she explains. “And in Home Finding, you are the last line of defence. If that narrative is unclear through emotive or ambiguous language, or if the tone is focused on risk aversion instead of risk positivity, it can narrow options before a child has even been considered, which means narrowing the chance that they find the right home.” 
 
Her training explores how language shapes provider response. Ambiguous and emotionally charged descriptors such as ‘manipulative’, ‘intimidating’ or ‘challenging’ often lack behavioural clarity and invoke a response in the reader that makes them reflect on what would make them feel manipulated, intimidated, or challenged. They do not put forward a need, or a description of a behaviour or how to respond. Without context, they can influence risk perception and reduce the number of people or services that come forward to offer a home. 
 
Ashleigh encourages practitioners to move from interpretation to observable description. The overarching category of need, the presentation of that need or behaviour for that particular child, and a small description of what those who know the child think would best meet that need. This provides the opportunity to move to co-producing care collaboratively with those who may be able to deliver care. 

She also emphasises the importance of including the child’s voice meaningfully. An ‘All About Me’ section should not be a token paragraph, but an insight into identity, preferences, strengths and aspirations. Even in urgent situations, capturing this perspective supports better matching. 

Person-Centred — and Future-Focused

Person-centred practice is widely referenced across children’s social care. Ashleigh challenges professionals to apply it with depth. 
 
A child-centred approach in Home Finding is not only about meeting current needs; it is about commissioning for progression. It requires clarity about where the child is now, and equally, where they are being supported to move towards. 
 
She cautions against reflexively increasing staffing levels without a clear developmental rationale. While safety is paramount, disproportionate models can unintentionally reinforce dependency or escalate perceived risk. Commissioning decisions must balance protection with growth. 
 
“Are we building a full-time package around a moment in crisis,” she asks, “or thinking of ways we can respond to and manage risk in a shared way with those delivering care?” One was that she put forward for all Local Authorities to consider how their risk share is through thinking about building a policy for the use of contingency pots. “A care provider cannot fair cost a service if they feel it is on them alone to manage unplanned risks, when you build policies that respond, they do not have to build into their fee ‘in case of incapacity’ enhancements”

Reform Through Perspective

At a time when the children’s social care system faces scrutiny around sufficiency, cost and quality, enhancing commissioning and Home Finding practice is essential. 

For local authorities seeking to strengthen Home Finding practice, CareCubed’s training offer provides analytical rigour grounded in human understanding. 

Because commissioning a placement is not simply about securing a bed. 

It is about shaping a childhood with intention and clarity. 

To learn more about optimising home finding and commissioning processes, visit www.carecubed.org.