Staff qualifications and ratios in children's homes : are they the key to the outcomes of care?
- UK : Policy Press, apr. 1999
Official reports into methods of improving the performance of children's homes have focused on staff training, staff ratios and size. This article tests these conclusions on 48 children's homes. It develops a measure of performance based on the social climate of a home and relates this to size, to the proportion of qualified staff, to whether the head of home was qualified and to staff ratios. The analysis supports the importance of size but finds no relationship between staff ratios and qualifications on the one hand and performance on the other