CAYSH is committed to providing a professional workforce who can best respond to young people's needs.
An organisation can and should spend a great deal of time employing carefully and training its staff members to settle in quickly and be successful in their roles - and we do.
The alternative - expending those same resources rectifying recruitment errors - is a waste of public money and unhelpful for our young people. That's why CAYSH spends upward of a month inducting new staff with a combination of formal and informal training and on-the-job mentoring.
Each of our last three Investors in People reviews have commended us on the way we launch new staff careers with CAYSH and then continually develop them. This includes our structured training programs, peer mentoring and our commitment to vocational training and qualification. In 2009 we set ourselves the goal of having a fully qualified staff team by 2013 and each year a third of our staff team engage in vocational training. We began the current year with over 60% of our team vocationally qualified.
We will employ external training immediately to develop particular areas of expertise so that we can ensure that when somebody starts working for CAYSH, they can do their job as it needs to be done. Then we set standard to ensure that "doing the job" means the best possible outcomes for young people and, consequently, we succeed.
We deal with people who lead challenging lives. Often made mature beyond their years by uninvited experiences, they are as likely to be involved with drugs, gangs, guns and violence as they are with sports, music, dance and art. Where we can we recruit staff who have experience in these areas but not to the exclusion of those who are determined to work in this field and have a natural gift for communicating with the young people we help. In these instances CAYSH provides the support and resources to wrap formal training and accreditation around successful outcomes and a positive impact on the lives of young people.
Our management processes includes formalised training plans for all members of staff and annual budgeting for staff training costs and time allowances. In an increasingly competitive and congested environment for the delivery of commissioned care services for young people, we want the best and most professionalised workforce we can have.
