Records & plans
What is a notifiable event (serious incident notification)?
A notifiable event is an incident a children's home must report to Ofsted and other relevant parties — including serious harm, allegations against staff, a child going missing and certain other significant events.
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<img src="https://careoptix.co.uk/glossary/notifiable-event/diagram.svg" alt="notifiable event — diagram from CareOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://careoptix.co.uk/glossary/notifiable-event">What is a notifiable event (serious incident notification)?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://careoptix.co.uk">CareOptix</a>
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</figure>Notification is about visibility rather than blame. The regulator cannot act on what it does not know, and a home that notifies promptly and fully is demonstrating the openness the standards expect.
Timeliness is part of the duty. A notification made late invites a question about why, and that question usually turns out to be more damaging than the event itself would have been.
The same event often requires notification to several parties — the placing authority, the child's social worker, sometimes the police or the LADO. Treating Ofsted notification as the whole obligation is a common gap.
In practice
A manager deciding at eleven at night whether something is notifiable.
The event is ambiguous. She is tired, the child is settled now, and the easy reading is that it does not meet the bar.
What protects her and the home is not the decision but the record of it: who considered it, when, on what basis, and what they concluded. A decision not to notify, reasoned and written down, is defensible in a way that silence is not.
The categories and the timing come from the Regulations, which is where they should be read rather than remembered.
What goes wrong in practice
- Delay while the home establishes the full facts, when the duty does not wait for certainty.
- Notified to Ofsted but not to the placing authority or the child's social worker.
- Under-reporting through a narrow reading of what counts as serious.
- No record of what was notified, to whom and when.