As many as 80 per cent of Northern Ireland's 30,000 social care workers have no qualifications relevant to their jobs, the Minister of Health, Social Services and Public Safety, Ms Bairbre de Brun, said yesterday.
They include social workers, residential childcare workers and home helps. A new Social Care Council is to regulate the profession from October.
"Employers will be able to check that individuals employed as social care workers are registered," she said. "The council will be able to remove unsuitable people from the register, thus making them unemployable in this sector."