We publish a placement stability figure on our own website: 95% at 90 days. Most providers quote something similar. Here is the uncomfortable truth about that class of statistic: there is no shared definition behind it, no external body audits it, and two providers quoting the same percentage can be describing completely different realities.
So rather than ask you to take our number on trust, this post explains how stability metrics work, the ways they get flattered, and the questions that expose a soft number, whoever you're asking.
What the metric should mean
A placement is stable at 90 days if the young person who moved in is still living there, in the same placement, 90 days later, unless the placement ended for a planned, positive reason: a return to family, a move to independent accommodation agreed in their pathway plan, or a transfer the Local Authority initiated for its own reasons.
The number that matters is the inverse: unplanned endings. Breakdowns. The 2am phone call, the refusal to return, the provider giving notice because they can no longer manage the risk. Every unplanned ending is a young person learning once more that nowhere holds them, and a commissioner back at square one with a harder-to-place referral than before.
Five ways the number gets flattered
Denominator games. The easiest flattery is deciding which placements count. Exclude emergency placements because they're "inherently unstable", exclude placements under 28 days as "settling-in", exclude the young person with the most complex needs as "an outlier", and a 75% rate becomes 95% without a single placement going better.
Reclassifying breakdowns. A breakdown recorded as a "planned move" stops being a breakdown. If a provider gives notice on a placement, manages the exit over two weeks, and logs it as planned, the stability figure survives intact while the young person's experience was still an ending they didn't choose.
Survivorship windows. Measuring only placements that started more than 90 days ago sounds reasonable, but pairing it with rapid growth means the riskiest period of the newest placements never appears in the published figure.
The missing baseline. 95% means little without volume. Five placements or sixty? A provider with three placements and one breakdown is at 67%; the same provider with one more stable placement jumps 8 points. Small denominators swing hard.
Counting properties, not people. Some providers measure whether the bed stayed filled, not whether the same young person stayed in it. A room that turned over three times in a quarter can look like 100% occupancy and zero instability if you count the wrong thing.
How we count ours
For transparency: our figure includes every placement, emergency placements included, measured per young person, with any ending we initiate counted as unplanned regardless of how the exit was managed. Planned positive moves are the only exclusions. We'll show any commissioner the underlying list during due diligence, names redacted until there's a data sharing agreement in place.
We publish that definition because the number is only useful if you can interrogate it. If our figure dips in a future quarter, it will dip in public, under the same rules.
The questions that expose a soft number
Whoever you're evaluating, five questions get under the percentage:
- What's the denominator: how many placements does the figure cover, over what period?
- Which placements are excluded, and why?
- How do you classify a placement that ends because you gave notice?
- Can you show the placement-level list behind the figure during due diligence?
- What was your worst quarter in the last two years, and what changed after it?
The last question is the most revealing. Every provider working with complex young people has had breakdowns. A provider who claims otherwise isn't stable; they're selective. The honest answer describes a difficult placement, what it cost, and what the provider changed. That answer tells you more than any percentage on a website, including ours.