Steering the way with volunteers

At Law-Call, we often find ourselves being asked questions about the use of volunteers and parents within a setting, so we thought we’d shed light on the considerations needed when exploring this area of recruitment.

Having volunteers in a childcare setting can be beneficial for everyone involved, adding immense value to what your organisation does. They can bring a wide range of skills, experience, and knowledge that build on the resources a setting already has, in turn helping achieve its mission and goals. But, perhaps more importantly, involving volunteers enables you to reach and help more people in the locality – after all, volunteers are often part of the communities you work or fundraise in. By giving them valuable experience, you can inspire them to become your greatest advocates.

Providing volunteer opportunities helps people connect with others, learn new skills and gain confidence. It often helps them find routes to employment, and can improve health and wellbeing, too. Alongside this, they can bring new opinions, ideas, and approaches to your work that help you adapt, stay relevant, and find new ways to improve.

Another bonus is that volunteers can widen the range of activities on offer by providing expertise in different areas – perhaps in business development, fundraising or marketing – that enhance relationships with families and the wider community.

A volunteer supports the organisation because they want to. It’s your organisation’s responsibility to make sure volunteers can conduct their role fully and safely. Training is one way to make sure they are well prepared, as effective training will help volunteers feel more confident and secure in their role, which will in turn increase the likelihood they want to continue volunteering.

The training needed will vary depending on what volunteers do at the setting, as well as on the skills and experience they already have. However, you cannot pay volunteers fixed sums or rewards – which includes vouchers, regular gifts or training not essential for the role.

A policy sets out an organisation’s approach to volunteering while explaining their role and its value. It’s advisable that you have a volunteer policy to ensure consistency in the setting’s approach to the role, as well as guidelines to help the safety of the children, the volunteer and the setting.

It should also include:

■ how the setting recruits volunteers.

■ how it ensures fairness and equity for all volunteers.

■ how it alters roles to make them more accessible.

■ the volunteer induction and training process. health and safety for volunteers.

■ the volunteers’ role in confidentiality and data protection.

Your policy should reflect the size and nature of your organisation, covering all vital information, but not be so formal that it puts off new volunteers.

Safeguarding is a key aspect of recruiting, training and engaging volunteers. Being clear about safeguarding guidelines, responsibilities and expectations creates a culture where everyone understands their right to be safe.

Your volunteers should see safeguarding as integral to everyday working. They should understand why it is important to keep everyone safe, including themselves.

You should think about safeguarding at all stages of volunteering:

1. Planning and putting in place policies to keep your volunteers and others safe.

2. Considering safeguarding when recruiting and inducting volunteers.

3. Including safeguarding in other volunteer support processes.

As with all employment, a criminal record check should be completed to give you information about an applicant’s criminal history. It’s an essential part of safeguarding, preventing unsuitable people from working with vulnerable groups and would equally apply to volunteers.

You should consider the health and safety risks involved with your volunteer role, conducting regular risk assessments.

If volunteers are from overseas, you will need to check that their visa allows them to volunteer and any conditions that apply. Remember that there is a difference between volunteering and voluntary work.

When looking at employing parents of children at the setting, it’s important to follow your usual recruitment processes and best practice to follow the safer recruitment process. While there’s no rules against recruiting a parent, it’s important to make sure there’s no suspicion of partiality or bias toward a parent.

It’s also important that to be aware of and manage conflict of interests when employing a parent. For example, it would be prudent to make sure parents aren’t given their child as one of the children they are normally responsible for, as this helps avoid any argument that their child is getting preferential treatment.

Volunteers can be an endless wealth of support for early years settings – make sure you’re dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s to reap the rewards for everyone!

All Alliance members can contact the team at Law-Call for legal advice. You can find their contact details in the members’ area of our website at portal.eyalliance.org.uk.