Of all the decisions in setting up a children’s home, location is one of the hardest to change once it’s made. Get it wrong, and no amount of good practice inside the building fully compensates for it. Get it right, and it quietly makes almost everything else easier.
What the regulations actually require
Ofsted’s registration process requires a location risk assessment as part of the application — a structured look at what’s nearby, and what risk that presents to the specific children the home is intended to support. This isn’t a box-ticking exercise. Inspectors want to see that the provider has genuinely thought about the local area in relation to their cohort, not just completed a template.
- Proximity to registered sex offenders or known risk factors relevant to the home’s specific cohort
- Distance from other children’s homes — too many homes clustered in one area raises questions about sufficiency of local support services and community impact
- Access to schools, health services, and transport links appropriate to the children’s needs
- The nature of the immediate neighbourhood and community, and how the home plans to integrate into it
What commissioners expect, that isn’t written down
Local authority commissioners — the people actually placing children — think about location slightly differently to how the regulations frame it. They’re weighing sufficiency (is there a genuine gap in provision in this type of area, for this type of need), and they’re increasingly cautious about homes opening in areas already carrying a high concentration of provision. A location that technically clears Ofsted’s risk assessment can still struggle to attract placements if commissioners see it as adding to an area that’s already saturated.
It’s also worth knowing that some local authorities have started raising concerns, informally, about homes opening a significant distance from where the children they’re likely to support originally lived — on the basis that distance from family, school and community can work against a child’s stability, even when the physical location itself presents no direct risk.
A worked example: assessing a location for Lilian Davis Group
We recently carried out a location assessment for Lilian Davis Group ahead of a new home — a client happy to be named here, though we’ve kept the specific property and figures anonymised, since the detail of any live site assessment is commercially sensitive to the provider. The kind of thinking below is exactly what goes into every location assessment we run.
The starting point wasn’t the property itself — it was the Group’s existing home. We looked at how far a prospective new site sat from it, in both driving time and public transport, and, just as importantly, whether it fell within the same local authority area or a different one. A short drive but a different local authority gave the Group two things at once: a genuinely separate referral and catchment base, rather than a second home competing with their existing one for the same local placements, and enough proximity for real operational benefits — shared senior oversight, cross-cover of staff in emergencies, and efficient use of the Responsible Individual’s time.
Next came the property type itself. An ordinary converted family home, rather than a purpose-built or former institutional building, supports the kind of settled, low-profile setting that Ofsted inspectors and placing authorities consistently favour for a small children’s home — and it’s worth checking early, since it shapes everything that follows.
Local infrastructure was assessed against the specific cohort the home was intended for, not generically. That meant identifying nearby specialist schools genuinely suited to the intended children’s needs, and being honest about which nearby options weren’t a good fit — one nearby specialist school, for example, was ruled out despite its proximity because its specialism didn’t match the cohort. A school list that looks impressive but doesn’t actually match the children being placed doesn’t hold up well against an inspector’s questions, or a commissioner’s due diligence.
The room layout itself set genuine, physical limits on how many children the home could support well — not a number picked in advance and then justified afterwards. Bedroom sizes, bathroom provision, and whether a genuine sensory or quiet space could be found within the building all fed into a recommended occupancy that matched what the building could actually deliver, rather than the maximum a floor plan could technically squeeze in.
For demand, we didn’t rely on the local authority’s own published position alone — we checked neighbouring boroughs too, since referrals for a specialist home like this realistically come from a wider region, not just the immediate local authority. A public statement from a neighbouring council, acknowledging a shortage in exactly this kind of provision, ended up being some of the strongest evidence in the whole assessment — official, quotable, and impossible to get from guesswork.
The most valuable finding, though, wasn’t about location at all. The financial modelling showed the home was comfortably viable at steady-state occupancy — but that Year 1 specifically carried a serious cash-flow risk, because staffing costs don’t scale down proportionally with partial occupancy in the way revenue does. A location can pass every locational and regulatory test and still fail on a working-capital question that has nothing to do with the property itself. That’s exactly the kind of risk a location assessment on its own won’t surface — which is why we never treat location and viability as two separate conversations.
Getting this right before you commit
The property search and the viability assessment should happen together, not in sequence. Falling in love with a property before checking what’s already registered nearby, or what a specific local authority’s placement patterns actually look like, is one of the most expensive mistakes we see — because by the time it surfaces, there’s often already a lease or a purchase in motion.
We help providers assess location alongside viability, before any commitment is made, so the property decision and the business decision are made together, not one forcing the other. Book a viability conversation before you commit to a property.