The Importance of Safer Recruitment Training in Safeguarding
When it comes to safeguarding the young people in your care, your team are your most important tool. A well-trained, effective, and conscientious team makes all the difference when it comes to ensuring the wellbeing of children and young people. It’s not just about listening and communicating - it’s about being able to recognise the tell-tale signs of abuse and neglect and appropriately reporting the instance. However, all of this is redundant if you don’t have individuals on your team who have their best interests at heart. This is why it’s essential for all organisations and businesses that work with children and young people to invest in safer recruitment training.
Safer recruitment training as a safeguarding mechanism
Safer recruitment training is an essential part of making sure that your team are not only well-motivated and skilled, but aren’t drawn to the position for inappropriate reasons, or driven by unprofessional reasons. This is essential in order to be able to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the children and young people in your care.
Safer recruitment training takes a practical, hands-on approach to addressing the concerns that employers have regarding the recruitment process. The training, guides the trainees through the entire recruitment process, from considering hiring a new team member, right down to the interviewing stage and actual hiring.
Throughout a safer recruitment process, there is a heavy emphasis on the role that the recruitment process itself plays in keeping children and young people safe. This is present not only in the objectives of safer recruitment - which align with the objectives of safeguarding - but the mechanisms of the training itself, too. The hands-on nature of safer recruitment training helps trainees focus their attention to recognising recruitment processes that are potentially problematic - such as failing to have the candidate in question prove that they have the right to work in the UK or not undergoing the correct background checks. Much of the practical experience lends itself directly to safeguarding, where there is also an emphasis on attention to detail, especially with regards to behaviour.
Excellent team members, excellent safeguarding
As we touched on above, your team is your most valuable asset when it comes to safeguarding. Safeguarding training itself actually uses incidents of lapsed care in safer recruitment to illustrate the importance of committed, correctly motivated staff in safeguarding.
Of course, it’s always essential to ensure that any member of staff that you bring on board is committed to the work that your business or organisation is doing. However, when it comes to working with children and young people, there’s an additional level of responsibility. As an educator, you have an obligation to ensure that you’re helping to create a safe and cultivating environment for the young people in your care. After time spent at home, school is the place where children and young people spend the most time - which just reinforces the importance of making sure that the staff they’re spending all of this time with are the kinds of candidates that will support and nurture them.
Ready to commit to a safer recruitment training for your staff? Get in touch!
