Placements Northwest: Registration Faq

Registration is a process to gather key information on an organisation and its services in order to support local authority Children’s Services Commissioners to make the best possible decisions about where to commission services for children and young people.

Registration has been set up as a three part process;

Organisational Registration: Requests key information about the company and is completed once. This part of the process requests information on the organisations financial viability, business structure etc.

Establishment or Service Specific Registration: Focuses on specific fostering services or an individual home and a document will be required to be completed for each service or home within the organisation. It holds information such as the OFSTED reports for homes/service etc.

Financial Information: This relates to your fees and the service category offered by your service and acknowledges the core cost specification if this has been developed for your service either regionally or nationally.

Information gathered is held in a centralised place on the Placement Information Management System (PIMS) so that information can be viewed by identified Officers within the member authorities.

Who can be Registered?

Placements North West will initially register organisations who provide the following services;

This is a major development in terms of increases the service sectors covered and reflects changes to the Children’s Services sector in the last couple of years. Originally, PIMS was designed to only hold information relating to Residential provision. As you can see from the above the database has been redesigned to incorporate provider information from other sectors

For Providers who offer the above services the following criteria for registration will apply;

All NW based providers who have previously provided information on PIMS will be contacted and asked to complete the appropriate registration documentation.
Any provider interested in providing Children’s Services in the North West will be able to register by completing the appropriate registration documentation. This includes any recently established new provision.
Providers will initially be divided into two geographic categories: namely North West and Out of Region areas.
For the purposes of this process and guidance the North West will be defined as any provision located within the geographic boundaries of the 21 participating local authorities plus an additional 20 miles radius to include those providers just outside the North West boundary.
Any providers within this additional extra 20 mile radius will be included in the NW category as recognition of Every Child Matters policy and an acknowledgement that although not geographically inside the North West region, these providers may in fact be looking after a child or young person, who has been placed by a NW local authority, whose usual residence is just inside the NW region.
Any borderline cases geographically, will be considered on request, taking into account the specialist nature of provision as well as placement history. This is intended to be a flexible approach and is clearly not designed to discriminate against any provider outside of the NW region but recognises that regional monitoring activities needs to concentrate on NW based provision as much as possible.

Any provider located outside this area will be categorised as being an ‘Out of Region’ service provider. All information provided by this category of provider will be held on the database for information and available as required by the participating local authorities. However, much of this information will be not validated by Placements North West except in exceptional cases when the specialist nature of the provision and placement frequency dictates otherwise. Local Authorities will be advised accordingly and may wish to request further information independently.

How do I become Registered?

Because there are a number of Providers in the North West, Registration is being undertaken with a phased approach. If you have not yet been contacted and you think you meet the Registration criteria outlined above, please email us at placementsnorthwest@tameside.gov.uk. This will ensure your organisation is included in the list of organisations being Registered.

What is PIMS?

Why are you asking me to register my organisation? What are the benefits to me?

The Registration process has a number of benefits for both Service Providers and Local Authority Service Commissioners:

Reduced Duplication: Currently most LAs in the region undertake some form of Provider Registration/Accreditation Provider. Previously in the NW, there were various approaches to Registration/accreditation, undertaken by the LAs and Providers found they were submitting the same information multiple times. By working with the 21 LAs and Providers to create a NW regional process and documentation, we have developed a Registration Process, which reflects best practice across the Region and will allow LAs to move resources from Registration to Monitoring Outcomes and other work.
Increased Choice: By having key Registration information tied to searching facilities stored in an easy and accessible format in PIMS, LAs will have access to tools which will help them to identify appropriate placements. Good quality information will reassure LAs and give them greater confidence to place with Providers they have not previously placed with.
Fairness: By having a Regional and standard process for gathering centralised information all Providers are able to offer their services on a standardised basis to Local Authorities.
Accessibility: Standardised Provider information will be accessible by all NW authorities rather than one or a small group of LAs in the region as may have been the case previously.
I have already Registered with AGMA/GMAC do I need to Register again?
Whilst acknowledging the frustrations for those Providers who have previously completed similar documents, we are asking Providers to complete the new documentation. This is because the documents have been reviewed and are now more streamlined. As documents are to be held centrally on PIMS for LA officers to access and use in making commissioning decisions, we would not wish to disadvantage Providers who have made the time and effort to complete previous forms by uploading older partial documents, which will not provide the more comprehensive details.

I am a large organisation that has to complete similar documents across the country
The frustration in this is understandable and PNW is engaged with tentative work being undertaken on a national basis, which is looking at the potential of standardising all or part of the process nationally. This will further assist both LAs and Providers.

How does this fit in with the Regional Fostering Scheme and Process?

The Regional Fostering Scheme (and Panel) was established in 2001 and was led by Manchester CC, on behalf of the AGMA and Partner authorities. Its initial work was to set up a regional accreditation process. Latterly, the Panel began to monitor the ‘accredited’ providers via an annual organisational quality assurance programme.

Responsibility for the Scheme moved to Placements Northwest in February 08 and it has now been expanded to include all 21 member LAs of PNW. As stated previously, registration and monitoring has been refocused and redesigned to support Commissioners and all the information is held centrally in PIMS. The remit of the Regional Fostering Panel, is now primarily focusing on assessing the organisational quality of NW based fostering provision that have placement activity in the North West.

Registration of Providers with Placements Northwest - Frequently Asked Questions

Who are Placements Northwest?

Which Local Authorities are members of PNW?

What is Registration?