Staffing and Safe Recruitment
Related guidance
- Staff Qualifications
- Education Supply Chains – A Better Hiring Toolkit - provides simple guidance to support schools and colleges to hire new employees in line with regulatory and industry best practices. May be of interest to employers in other sectors.
Amendment
In September 2024, a link was added to Education Supply Chains - A Better Hiring Toolkit.
The Service should provide enough staff to meet the Service's requirement and there should be a clear management structure which defines the lines of responsibility.
The workforce plan should be included in the Statement of Purpose: the staffing structure; experience and qualifications of staff and arrangements for supervision of staff practice.
The Service must be properly staffed and resourced to meet the needs of the young people. The managers should plan staffing levels to ensure that they meet the needs of young people and can respond flexibly to unexpected events or opportunities. Staffing structures should promote continuity of support to the young people. If young people complain or give a view on how the staffing structure could be improved to promote the best care for them, appropriate action should be taken.
Contingency plans should be prepared in the event of a shortfall in staffing levels. This assessment should be recorded and available for inspection by the placing authorities. Staff will be suitably vetted and qualified and able to deliver high-quality services to young people. The manager should ensure that staff can access appropriate facilities and resources to support their training needs and should understand the key role they play in the training and development of staff in the Service. See also: Staff Qualifications Procedure.
Staff will work collaboratively to provide consistency and stability, with clear responsibilities and accountabilities to ensure that staff have a sense of shared ownership about their practice. Arrangements for recruitment and appraisals are robust and include young people as appropriate.
Staff should be made familiar with the Service's internal whistleblowing procedures through the induction process.
Careful recruitment and regular monitoring of staff is used to prevent unsuitable staff from being recruited and having the opportunity to harm young people or to place them at risk. The relevant authorities and professional bodies will be informed of any concerns about inappropriate adults. Commissioners of our Service will ensure that appropriate checks have been carried about by the Service in relation to safe recruitment and employment checks.
References should be sought as part of employment checks. You should always check out a reference if you have any doubt about its quality or reliability.
You may not be able to obtain a reference from a previous employer, for example because they are no longer operating, or have died. If this happens, you should ask for another reference from another previous employer.
You must try, as far as possible, to find out why a prospective staff member's previous employment ended, if their previous jobs involved working with children, young people or vulnerable adults. You should try to obtain this information from their most recent employer, and other employers where relevant. For example, this could be a conversation with the previous employer and you record the detail of this on the staff member's file.
The appropriate level DBS checks must be carried out before a person is appointed to engage in Regulated Activity within the Service. To determine which level of DBS check a role is eligible for, refer to the DBS Eligibility Guidance (GOV.UK).
The information contained in an up-to-date DBS certificate must be reviewed to decide whether this reveals any concerns about the person's suitability to work with children/young people. If there are concerns, the information must be used to come to a conclusion whether or not to appoint the person. Providers and managers must keep up-to-date with what constitutes Regulated Activity and fully investigate any information that indicates that a person may be barred from working with children or vulnerable adults.
Anyone who is barred from work with children is committing an offence if they apply for, offer to do, accept or do any work constituting Regulated Activity. It is also an offence for an employer knowingly to offer work in a regulated position, or to procure work in a regulated position for an individual who is disqualified from working with children, or fail to remove such an individual from such work.
Once appointed, a person must continue to meet the remit-specific regulatory requirements after the initial recruitment process.
In relation to the Disclosure and Barring Service checks, the following must be recorded:
- The date the DBS check was carried out;
- The DBS certificate number;
- The name of the person who checked the original certificate;
- Whether there was any information or concerns arising from the check that required further attention before you decided to appoint the individual;
- The name of the person who carried out the update check, if the individual is registered with the DBS update service;
- If concerns were identified once a person was appointed, steps you have taken to review a person's suitability to continue to work with children and young people;
- What actions you take if a person changes their role after they have been appointed;
- The actions you have taken in order to protect children from contact with unsuitable persons; this may include referral to the DBS or other relevant authorities.
Disclosure and Barring Service checks should be:
- Treated as confidential;
- Kept secure;
- Destroyed as soon as no longer required.
Information on checks for candidates who have spent time abroad or have come from abroad can be found at: GOV.UK, Criminal records checks for overseas applicants.
Please note: A DBS check has no official expiry date. Any information included will be accurate at the time the check was carried out. It's up to the employer to decide when a new check is needed.
The Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS), operate an optional Update Service which is designed to reduce the number of DBS checks requested.
Instead of a new check being necessary whenever an individual applies for a new role working with children and young people, individuals can opt to subscribe to the online Update Service. This will allow them to keep their DBS certificate up to date, so that they can take it with them from role to role, within the children's workforce.
Employers do not need to register, but can carry out free, instant, online status checks of a registered individual's status. A new DBS check will only be necessary if the status check indicates a change in the individual's status (because new information has been added). See GOV.UK for more information.
For the latest guidance on DBS referrals, see the GOV.UK website.
If you use the DBS update service to check the status of an individual's DBS certificate, you should be able to demonstrate how you manage and record details of any check you carry out.
As part of the recruitment process, the employer/prospective employer must also check that the applicant has the right to work in the UK.
See: GOV.UK: Checking a Job Applicants Right to Work.
Employers can be penalised/fined if they employ someone who does not have the right to work and they did not carry out the correct checks, or did not do them properly.
If you are recruiting a permanent member of staff, you can, exceptionally, allow a person to start working at the Service if you only have the proof of identity and the DBS certificate, while you continue to make enquiries. For example, you may need to employ additional staff quickly. If you do this, the person must be supervised when working with young people. You must be able to provide evidence that you have taken reasonable steps to obtain the information. There may be occasions when, despite your best efforts, you are not able to obtain some of the required information. Whilst this might happen occasionally, it should not happen regularly. It is not good recruitment practice to employ staff without all the required information. If you are unable to obtain all the relevant information, inspectors will want to know what additional action you took to satisfy yourself that the person was suitable and, if any relevant information was missing, what action you took to mitigate any risks you identified.
If you need to use an agency member of staff at short notice, and you have not previously used this person, as a minimum, you should check their identity and obtain written confirmation from the agency that it has carried out the relevant suitability checks. You should review the evidence that the person is suitable as soon as possible, for example, the next working day. In these circumstances, the agency staff member must not be in sole charge of the Service.
The manager must:
- Ensure that each employee completes an appropriate induction;
- Ensure that each permanent appointment of an employee is subject to the satisfactory completion of a period of probation; and
- Provide each employee with a job description outlining the employee's responsibilities.
The manager must ensure that all employees:
- Undertake appropriate continuing professional development;
- Receive practice-related supervision by a person with appropriate experience; and
- Have their performance and fitness to perform their roles appraised at least once every year.
See also: Staff Supervision and Appraisal Procedure.
The manager must operate a disciplinary procedure which, in particular:
- Provides for the suspension from work of an employee if necessary in the interests of the safety or welfare of children; and
- Provides that the failure on the part of an employee to report an incident of abuse, or suspected abuse, whether past or present, in relation to a child/young person to the manager, an officer of the local authority in whose area the Service is located or a police officer) is a ground on which disciplinary proceedings may be instituted.
Clear recruitment records will be kept by the Service which that summarise the vetting and recruitment checks.
Last Updated: September 9, 2024
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