Overview
Three key principles will help make sure you’re putting safeguarding into practice when finding and selecting your volunteers.
- Your processes must relate to the level of risk involved. Don’t burden people with too many responsibilities for a low risk role.
- Your requirements must suit the risk of each role. Don’t use a one-size-fits-all approach for all staff and volunteers.
- You must review this at least once a year, check you are following your plans and make sure they are working well to keep people safe from harm.
Safer recruitment is a term used when recruiting volunteers and staff to help you discourage people with a potential to cause harm. It means you must take all reasonable steps to make sure that those you recruit into your organisation are suitable and appropriate. It refers to a set of practices set out in government guidance that you need to use for all roles if you are delivering activity for children or adults at risk. The principles are useful for everyone.
- If your organisation regularly takes responsibility for children, use this set of safer recruitment pages (from NSPCC Learning).
- If you want to check that you are taking a safeguarding approach to finding volunteers no matter who you work with, you should combine the following pages with our general guide to recruiting and managing volunteers.
- If your organisation works with young people, you may find the safe people guidance on the Safeguarding and Risk Management Hub useful (from the National Youth Agency).
The pages in this guide
The pages in this guide to safer recruitment of volunteers are split into three sections of advice.
- Creating and advertising the volunteer role with a focus on the role risk assessment from a safeguarding point of view.
- Choosing the right volunteers which covers applications, assessment and interviews.
- Getting new volunteers started which looks at induction and at training.
