Embedding child-safe Practice in your Recruitment Process
This blog will not focus on the current situation caused by the virus which has resulted in scores of people losing their jobs or losing hours at their jobs. Instead, we’re going to be looking forward.
As we begin (as of April 21, 2020) to see the end of extreme restrictions come in to focus on the horizon, it might be time for some child-serving organisations to begin to think about their strategy to establishing their new normal. With some luck, for many organisations, that strategy will include a significant and sustained recruitment phase. For those organisations, the coming weeks might present a unique opportunity to review their recruitment process to ensure it is oriented toward keeping children safe.
The Recruitment Team in any child-serving organisation are uniquely placed to be one of the strongest tools in protecting children from abuse, neglect and exploitation. Often, they do this without even having regular contact with the children they are protecting! More than that, a child-safe recruitment process protects children so early in the continuum that it prevents unsuitable people from being employed by child-safe organisations in the first place. A truly proactive child-safe practice.
Organisations that have embedded child-safe practice in their recruitment process are implementing Principle 5 of the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations. Principle 5 holds that ‘People working with children and young people are suitable and supported to reflect child safety and wellbeing values in practice.’ Specifically, a child-safe recruitment process embeds the Action Areas of:
5.1 Recruitment, including advertising, referee checks and staff and volunteer pre-employment screening, emphasises child safety and wellbeing, and
5.2 Relevant staff and volunteers have current working with children checks or equivalent background checking.
With this is mind, as organisations develop their recovery strategies and consider the role of recruitment, it might be worthwhile to utilise the next few weeks to review how your organisation undertakes recruitment and consider if your current approach is protecting children.
To support organisations to be positioned to review their recruitment function from a child-safety perspective, PCA is in the final stages of developing a low-cost webcast on embedding child-safe practice in recruitment that will be available from the PCA website. The webcast is a condensed, live-recording, of PowerPoint and voice-over, of PCA’s ‘Making Recruitment Child-Safe Training’ which was previously delivered face-to-face. The session covers:
The importance of child-safe practice in recruitment and selection
Examination of the recruitment and selection phase of a case study from the Royal Commission
3 Areas of focus, with examples to improve your recruitment process and embed child-safe practice, and
Introduction to some additional tools that aid a child-safe recruitment process.
In addition to the condensed webcast, PCA has also re-developed the 2-hour face-to-face version to be available for online, live and interactive delivery.
If you are interested in downloading the webcast, click here to be notified by email when it is released. If you are interested in booking PCA to deliver the full online version, visit our Contact page to make an enquiry.
UPDATE:
PCA has released the recorded webcast, ‘Embedding Child Safe Practice in Recruitment.’ It is available for purchase and download from our Online Training page.