Safer Recruitment Forum
The Children’s Homes (England) Regulations 2015 and Quality Standards set out the steps that registered persons must take to ensure that staff and members of the proprietor body are recruited safely.
This Forum is specific for staff who are involved with the management or delivery of recruitment processes within residential homes.
In response to requests from RIs and RMs we have set up a regular meeting to focus on leading safer recruitment in residential children’s homes.
Safer Recruitment is central to the safeguarding of children and young people. All organisations that employ staff or volunteers to work with children and young people have a duty to safeguard and promote their welfare. This includes ensuring that the organisation adopts safe recruitment and selection procedures which aim to prevent unsuitable persons from gaining access to children.
We’ve been providing managers with lots of advice and support and agreed there needs to be a space where managers can receive focused information, CPD and most importantly have the opportunity to regularly talk to other managers in the same position.
The sessions are facilitated by Tara Lawson. Tara is a dedicated safeguarding professional with 15 years’ experience of working with children, young people, and adults at risk, across a number of settings, including custody, social care, education, community, and sports organisations.
Tara is passionate about making safeguarding simple, and ensuring that legislation, guidance, and best practice is accessible and understandable to everyone, from an organisation’s board of trustees, right through to children and adults at risk and their families or guardians. Tara aims to remove the worry that so many organisations have about getting safeguarding wrong and replace it with confident understanding.
Tara is a qualified adult trainer, delivering bespoke and accredited Safeguarding and Safer Recruitment training. Tara is passionate about building the knowledge and confidence of organisations and their staff teams through engaging and though-provoking training, ensuring that settings are safe for those accessing them.
These meetings will take place for 2 hours, 3 times per year and will generally be online.
Next Meeting Dates :
- Tuesday 30th January 2024
- Tuesday 28th May 2024
- Tuesday 17th September 2024
Participants pay £99 + VAT per annum to attend up to four forums a year. See below for details.
forum information and booking:
The event is open to registered managers, responsible individuals or nominated staff and is a great opportunity to share ideas, seek support and improve practice.
RIs/RMs or nominated staff can join the group for £99+vat per annum, which will entitle them to attend the 4 group meetings and work together on issues of common concern. Typically the sessions will include specific CPD input on an area of research, practice, guidance or issue of contemporary concern (another name for COVID implications!). Sometimes we will invite guests from commissioning, the regulator, or speakers.
dialogue will be responsible for invoicing. If you register we will securely store the information you give us. We will use this to keep you updated in line with your preferences. You can end your membership at any stage by contacting us and we will remove all your data. We will confirm all this by email.
This Forum is specific for staff who are involved with the management or delivery of recruitment processes within residential homes and aims to support you:
- To know the correct procedure when preparing to recruit
- To know how to select the right people
- To know how to assess the risk
- To maintain an ongoing culture of vigilance
- To recognise how abusers operate within organisations
- To be able to recognise different types of abuse
- To be able to recognise inappropriate behaviour and unsafe practice
- To know how to develop appropriate policies and procedures for your organisation
- To ask questions and get advice on individual cases/topics (remember, there is no question that is too silly!)
- To discuss and share good practice
- To keep up to date with changes in legislation
- To learn from local and national cases.
Overall, we will be using a variety of delivery methods, but our aim is to provide you with a safe and relaxed arena for you keep up to date, ask the questions that have been puzzling you and share experiences.
We look forward to working with you soon.
To join the Safer Recruitment Forum, please complete the form below:
Other communities of interest groups….
We also run other forums for specialist support in the residential community for participation leads, online safety leads, residential leadership group, exploitation leads and children with disabilities.
costs
The groups are run on an annual membership fee of £99+vat for each community of interest. We are keen to make the model accessible and supportive to residential homes, so additional memberships will access a £20 discount, meaning subsequent members from your home to the same group or to a different group will cost £79+vat each.
membership for homes
As we’ve grown these communities, we are now able to offer homes one representative at each of the seven communities of interest memberships for just £399+vat for annual membership.
If you are a multi home organisation and would like to sign up several homes for this offer – please contact us to discuss the possibilities of further discounts directly on 01803 493030.
Further training opportunities to support your safer recruitment practices
People in any organisation can use their position of trust to abuse vulnerable children and adults. Others do not hold true to their values and neglect the people they work with or fail to speak up. This safer recruitment course looks at how to run a recruitment process that puts as many barriers in the way of potential abusers as possible in order to keep service users safe.