Signage for supported living, respite and children’s services

Not every building a care provider runs is a nursing home. A supported living scheme is housing with support. A short-break service turns over its rooms every few days. A children’s home is a house on a street, and a special school has more doors than any of them. The signs come from the same factory and the same design system; what changes is the building, the door list and the words on it.

Price a whole building Send us a door list

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What this page is, and what it is not

This page is about signs: which doors in these buildings need one, what the differences from a nursing home are, and what we need in order to quote. It is not about your registration, and we are not the people to tell you about it. Supported living, short breaks, children’s residential services and schools sit in different parts of the regime from each other and from a nursing home, and the arrangements differ again between England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. You know which applies to your service and we do not, so nothing here should be read as guidance on it. Nothing here is advice about anybody’s care, and nothing here is advice about children.

The three estates

Supported living schemes

Housing with support: self-contained flats, or a shared house with four or five tenancies. People hold a tenancy, so the door is their front door and the hallway is a shared hallway rather than a reception.

One entrance sign with the scheme name and number, and one directional sign where the hallway divides
Tenants' front doors: a permanent number, or a holder with a changeable insert where the tenant chooses what is on it
Bathroom, toilet and kitchen in a shared house, in high contrast with a pictogram as well as the word
Staff office, sleep-in room, medication store, records, laundry, cleaning store, meters, bin and bike stores — in a visibly plainer family than the tenants' doors

Signing a supported living scheme: what changes from a care home →

Respite and short-break services

The person in the room this week has never been in the building before. Everything a long-stay resident learns over a month has to be readable on arrival, and the name on the door changes every few days.

Every bedroom door: a permanent number that the rota and the fire list refer to, plus a changeable insert above it
Inserts a support worker can change in seconds, with no tools and nothing to order
Orientation signs carrying more load than in a long-stay home: toilet and bathroom from wherever people sit, lounge, dining, the way out to the garden, and where to find staff
One sign at the threshold where a short-break service shares a building with another service, said once and not repeated

Respite and short breaks: the changeable-insert specification →

Children's residential services and special schools

A children's home is a house on a street and the signage has to keep it that way, so the question is how few signs it needs. A special school is the opposite: more doors than a care home, grouped into blocks, and already numbered by whoever drew the fire plan.

In a house: six to ten signs. Staff office, sleep-in, medication and records, laundry, cleaning store, meters and boiler, bin and external stores, and one front-door number that matches the street
Bedroom doors in a house are the home's decision and the young person's, not a procurement decision — order the frames and leave the inserts to be filled in
In a school: the room-numbering convention agreed first, then one sign per door carrying the permanent number, with the class name on a changeable part because class names move every September
The school rooms a care-home schedule has no equivalent for: sensory and low-stimulus rooms, the hygiene and changing room, therapy rooms named by discipline, the hall, servery and library, plant and stores, and the outdoor routes and gates

Signing a children's home, and signing an SEN school →

What is the same as a nursing home

The same factory

Every sign is made to order by Wayfinders, so the wording, the pictogram, the size and the finish are specified per building rather than picked off a shelf. A single replacement can be matched to the original years later, as long as the specification was written down.

The same design system

Our oak and walnut door signs carry DSDC 1A accreditation from the Dementia Services Development Centre at the University of Stirling. That is a document about those products from a named third party, and it is the same discipline on contrast and legibility whichever building the door is in.

The same range

Door, directional, orientational, projecting, personalised and low-profile signs, and door decals, in eight colours. Paper-insert types are the ones that matter most where the content is meant to change.

What we need in order to quote

A building is quoted from a door list and a fixing specification. If you have both, a price is arithmetic. If you have neither, the first useful piece of work is a walk-round that produces them, and that is true whoever eventually makes the signs.

A door list, or a room schedule: every door you intend to sign, by number, with the wording you want on it. This is the document that turns a building into a price, and it is the one most buyers do not have yet.
Which doors are people's own doors, which are shared, and which are staff or service. The three groups take different products.
The fixing method per door type — adhesive on a painted fire door, mechanical into a frame — and whether anything may be fixed to a landlord's doors at all.
One finish across the estate, or a finish per building. The first makes a single replacement in two years trivial; the second makes every reorder a conversation.
The mounting height, written as a number, if the building is a school. It is the thing most often left to the installer and the reason one corridor ends up with three heights.
Who approves the wording, named before the first draft rather than after it.

Specify once, apply to the estate

If you run more than one building, the unit of work is not a building. It is one written specification — finish, products, fixing, wording conventions, who approves — with a door list per building underneath it. That is what makes the fifth scheme or the twelfth house take an afternoon.

Price a whole building If you own several buildings Specifying a whole school