Children's Workforce Strategy
The Children’s Workforce Strategy was published by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) as a consultative document in 2005. Its main objective was to improve outcomes for children and young people by ensuring that those people who plan, manage and deliver services at the front line have the skills and capacity to deliver a quality service. In other words the provision of a skilled and more stable workforce, in sufficient numbers, led and deployed effectively around the needs of children and young people.
To help achieve that objective it is important that local authorities and their partners have the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time. The Government’s vision is of a world-class children’s workforce that is competent and confident; people aspire to be part of and want to remain in – where they can develop their skills and build satisfying and rewarding careers; and parents, carers, children and young people trust and respect. The unique challenge in the case of children’s services is how to ensure all the different agencies involved work together to develop the kind of workforce necessary to deliver high quality services to children and young people.
Approximately 2000 stakeholders responded to the consultation and, taking account of their comments, the Government has now confirmed their vision of a children's workforce that:
- Strives to achieve the best possible outcomes for all children and young people, and to reduce inequalities between the most disadvantaged and the rest.
- Is competent, confident and safe to work with children and young people.
- People aspire to be part of and want to remain in where they can develop their skills and build satisfying and rewarding careers.
- Parents, children and young people trust and respect.
The Government's response to the consultation outlines what they will do, with partners, to:
- Support the development of local workforce strategies.
- Strengthen safeguarding and improve outcomes for looked-after children.
- Tackle the key strategic challenges:
- improving recruitment, retention and the quality of practice;
- bringing services together around the needs of children, young people and families; and
- strengthening leadership, management and supervision.
- Make early progress against the immediate sectoral priorities:
- establishing a more professional workforce in the early years; and
- tackling the problems facing social care, including foster care.
The Government response document and the original consultation are available below, together with the accompanying document ‘Building an Integrated Qualifications Framework’.
Children's Workforce Strategy
Children's Workforce Strategy Government Response
Building and Integrated Qualifications Framework