Social Care practitioners recruited as Ofsted Inspectors.

Social Care practitioners recruited as Ofsted Inspectors.

EHP Consultancy

www.ehpchildrenshomes.co.uk

Portfolio for legislative and regulatory compliance, commercial knowledge, operational and strategic governance & management in children's social care UK

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Social Care practitioners recruited as Ofsted Inspectors.

Ofsted is exploring how social care practitioners could complement their regulatory workforce and have developed a small-scale pilot to run for 6 to 9 months.

The recruitment of staff can only add to the recruitment challenges across the sector. However,

Ofsted have stated they would only be recruiting from some of the largest providers who have the

greatest capacity to release frontline staff and can ensure there is no impact on the children.

At EHP Children’s Homes Consultancy we believe the recruitment of staff that understands the reality of the social care sector is a good initiative. However, such targeting recruitment – even from the larger providers still exacerbates the problem: organisations will still have to recruit for

replacements from a diminished pool.

There is a potential irony here that the consequences on practice and performance by having a

reduced staff team may be highlighted by Ofsted during an inspection; will mitigation influence

outcome? I seriously doubt it.