Roles & responsibility
What is staff training?
Staff training in a children's home covers the qualification staff must work towards, plus the specific training the home's children and its model of care require.
There is a required qualification for care staff with a period to achieve it, and tracking who is where against that is a registration-relevant matter rather than an HR one.
Beyond it, training has to match the children actually in the home. A home caring for children with particular needs requires training in those needs rather than a generic programme.
Records need to show what was covered rather than that a session occurred, because the question after an incident is whether the person had been trained in that specific thing.
In practice
A training matrix that is entirely green.
Everybody has done safeguarding, physical intervention and first aid. Two of the team completed theirs online in a single afternoon during a quiet shift.
Completion and competence are different measurements, and a matrix can only hold the first.
The question worth asking in supervision is what somebody would actually do, not what they have attended.
What goes wrong in practice
- Qualification deadlines tracked by the individual rather than the home.
- Generic training programmes unrelated to the children currently placed.
- Attendance recorded without content, so nothing can be evidenced afterwards.