Involving Children in Their Own Plans: Why It Matters and How to Do It Without Turning Home Into an Office

Every child living in a children's home has paperwork following them around. Care plan, placement plan, PEP, health plan, risk assessment, behaviour support strategy, the home's own internal placement plan and the daily logs that record the rhythm of their life. Some of those documents the child may have seen. Some they may have heard read aloud at a review. Many they will never lay eyes on. 

This is a problem, and it is one we have not solved well as a sector. We talk a great deal about children's voices, wishes and feelings. We hold the language in high regard. Yet too often the gap between what is said about a child in their plans and what the child themselves would say is a gap wide enough to walk through. 

If we are serious about good care, children must be involved in their own plans. Not as a tick box on a form. Not as a signature at the end of a review. As genuine contributors to the documents that describe their lives. 

Why this matters 

The duty to involve children in decisions about them is not a matter of professional preference. It is woven through the legal and regulatory framework that governs our work. 

Section 22(4) of the Children Act 1989 requires the local authority to ascertain the wishes and feelings of the child before making any decision in relation to a looked after child.¹ Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child establishes the right of the child to express their views and to have those views given due weight in accordance with their age and understanding.² 

Within children's homes themselves, Regulation 7 of the Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015 sets out the children's wishes, feelings and views standard.³ The registered person must ensure that staff ascertain and consider each child's views, wishes and feelings, help the child to express them, help the child to understand how those views have been taken into account and give reasons for decisions made in relation to them. 

So the law is clear. But the more important point is the practice one. Plans that children have shaped are plans that children recognise. Plans they recognise are plans they engage with. And plans they engage with are plans that work. 

For children who have spent years on the receiving end of decisions made by others, often decisions that disrupted, separated and overruled them, the experience of being a co-author rather than a subject is corrective. It is part of how we build trust, how we model healthy adult relationships and how we prepare young people to advocate for themselves in a world that will not always listen. 

What meaningful involvement looks like 

Involvement is not a single event. It is a thread that runs through every stage of a placement. 

At the point of admission, where possible, the child should visit the home, choose elements of their bedroom and meet the staff who will care for them. The placement information they receive should be written for them, in language they understand, with images and accessible formats where needed. From their first day the child should know who their key worker is, who their social worker is, who their Independent Reviewing Officer is and how to raise a concern, a wish or a question. 

In daily life, involvement looks ordinary. It is the child being asked what they would like for tea, what they want to do at the weekend, what music plays in the kitchen, who joins them at the table. It is the staff team noticing what the child likes and does not like, what frightens them and what comforts them, and adjusting accordingly. The internal placement plan should be visibly informed by these everyday observations. 

In key work sessions, involvement looks like a conversation rather than an interview. The best key work I have ever seen takes place during a walk to the shop, in the kitchen while cooking or in the car driving back from school. The recording happens later, in the staff member's own words but framed by what the child has said. Where appropriate the child is shown what has been written and asked whether it captures them fairly. 

In the care planning process, involvement looks like preparation for reviews, support to attend reviews or contribute to them in whatever form suits the child, advocacy where the child wants it and clear feedback afterwards on what was decided and why. For young people aged sixteen and over, the Pathway Plan is meant to be their plan in the fullest sense, and the home should treat it as such. 

The tension between homely home and paperwork 

Here is where it becomes difficult. A children's home should feel like a home. It is the child's home. The smells, sounds, routines, conversations and small intimacies of daily life are not incidental to the work. They are the work. 

And yet the regulatory framework requires documentation. Every shift produces records. Every conversation can become a log entry. Every decision must be evidenced. Children are not blind to this. They notice when a staff member reaches for a notebook after a chat. They notice when their words appear in a meeting they were not in. They notice when their key work session feels less like time with a trusted adult and more like time with a clipboard. 

If we are not careful, the very paperwork that exists to safeguard the child can begin to make them feel observed rather than known. 

There is no clean resolution to this tension, but there are honest ways of holding it. 

The first is to be transparent. Children should know that records are kept, why they are kept, who reads them and what their rights are in relation to them. Children who understand the purpose of recording are usually far more comfortable with it than children who do not. 

The second is to separate the moment of conversation from the moment of recording. Good staff do not write while a child is opening up to them. They listen, they remember, they remain present and they record afterwards. They check back with the child where it matters, particularly on sensitive content or decisions that affect the child directly. 

The third is to involve the child in the writing where possible. Some children will want to read what has been said about them. Some will want to write their own version. Some will want to draw, to record a voice note or to use a tool such as Mind of My Own. The format matters less than the principle. The child is the author of their story, and the records should reflect that. 

The fourth is to keep the home a home. Paperwork lives in offices, on laptops and in files. The communal space of the home should be a space for living. When key work happens at the kitchen table, it should look and feel like a conversation, not a meeting. The administrative tail of the work should not wag the relational dog. 

In closing 

Children in our care have rarely had much control over the decisions made about them. Involving them in their own plans is one of the most concrete ways we can change that. It is a regulatory expectation, certainly. It is also a moral one. And it is, in my experience, one of the things that distinguishes a home that is genuinely caring for children from one that is merely accommodating them. 

Hold the tension. Keep the home homely. Do the paperwork honestly. And let the child be the author of the plan that describes their life. 

Angela Griffiths is a qualified social worker registered with Social Work England and the Founder and Director of Children's Homes Improvement Ltd, providing independent consultancy, training and Regulation 44 services to the children's residential care sector. 

¹ Children Act 1989, section 22(4) and (5). 

² United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 12, adopted by General Assembly resolution 44/25 of 20 November 1989. 

³ The Children's Homes (England) Regulations 2015, SI 2015/541, Regulation 7.