Welcome to Placement Portal, a UK wide database of currently available placements for children and young people in private children’s homes, through independent foster agencies, in specialist schools and in registered children's homes with education. Placement Portal carries detailed information on providers who currently have vacancies, where those vacancies are, the direct contact details for the people to whom enquiries about placement vacancies should be made and a wealth of further information about the provider, the settings, the organisation, it’s staffing, aims and objectives. Where providers have their own websites, direct links to those websites are included to allow commissioners to open up a further window to gather even more information. Providers and commissioners can register FREE using the buttons above.

Placement Portal was established in 2009 with the objective of providing ‘live’ information on placement vacancies across the UK to Local Authority commissioners of placements for children and young people. Local Authority commissioners can register FREE using their .gov.uk email address and a password of their choice within one minute. Commissioners then immediately have access to the database and the ability to make searches of vacancies either by searching all vacancies, searching on a geographical basis or through matching specific needs of young people to available placements. The fastest search takes just one click and results are found within a couple of seconds making searching for placements through the website particularly time effective.

Placement Portal acts as a conduit between providers with vacancies and commissioners searching for placements, streamlining the searching process, facilitating and encouraging direct contact between parties and giving providers a nationally available platform on which to advertise the services they offer and the good work they undertake on behalf of children and young people. The website is funded through provider’s advertising costs which are highly competitive when compared with other less interactive and current methods of advertising. The website also supports commissioners in asking for tenders from providers in making a placement for a young person with specific needs using our own Placement/Outcomes matching documentation.