In brief: Jersey’s Children’s Department spends 78% of its budget on staff, yet does not have a reliable system for tracking staff turnover, Children’s Minister Richard Vibert has admitted. The revelation came during a scrutiny hearing this week, where the minister also disclosed that a planned therapeutic home on the island was abandoned partly because the department could not attract enough staff to run it.
Three Quarters of the Budget, Zero Turnover Data
When St Lawrence Constable Tina Palmer, a member of the Children, Education and Home Affairs Scrutiny Panel, pressed the minister on what the current staff turnover rate was, Mr Vibert’s answer was candid, if not exactly reassuring. “Now this is where we have a problem, because we don’t have a system,” he told the panel. “Unfortunately, some of the data is combined with other data, but we are working on being able to calculate the turnover.”
To be clear: a department that directs 78% of its budget towards personnel costs does not, at present, have its own figures for how quickly those personnel are leaving. For a department responsible for some of the island’s most vulnerable children, that is a significant gap in basic management information.
The Jersey Evening Post reports that Mr Vibert has held roles within the Children, Young People, Education and Skills department since 2022, initially as Assistant Children’s and Education Minister, before becoming Children’s Minister in 2024 following a change of government. He was reappointed to the role after June’s election.
Recruitment: Progress Made, Challenges Remain
To give credit where it is due, Mr Vibert did point to genuine progress on the social worker front. He told the panel that the proportion of social workers employed as full-time staff had risen from around 30% to 70%, and that recruiting social workers “isn’t really a problem now” compared to previous years.
He attributed earlier difficulties in part to Jersey’s reputation. “I do fear that what had actually happened in Jersey is that Jersey, because of bad publicity and turnover of staff, that people were actually put off coming here,” he said, adding that he believed that obstacle had now been overcome.
The department’s longer-term answer to recruitment pressures, Mr Vibert explained, is a “home-grown” approach. A summer recruitment drive targeted local trainees as well as qualified staff for residential care roles, and Director of Children’s Services Donna Marriott reportedly said the department had been “overwhelmed with interest” at the time.
Residential positions, however, remain the harder nut to crack. Mr Vibert described restructuring the residential service as “our biggest challenge at the moment,” though he said it was “difficult to go into details” about why the restructure could not yet be implemented. Ms Marriott added that “we’re asking people to do things differently,” which, in the context of children’s residential care, covers a great deal of ground.
Therapeutic Home Plan Shelved
Perhaps the starkest consequence of the staffing difficulties is the decision to abandon plans for a therapeutic home in Jersey. The department “recognised that we would not attract the staff to run it,” Mr Vibert told the panel, meaning that children requiring specialist therapeutic support must continue to travel off-island to receive it. For children already in difficult circumstances, being placed far from home and family is rarely the ideal outcome, and it is a cost, both human and financial, that a functioning local facility might have avoided.
The minister acknowledged that competing with the UK for specialist staff remains a structural challenge for the island, a familiar refrain in Jersey’s public services, where geography and cost of living conspire to make recruitment a perennial headache.
Source: Jersey Evening Post
