You can’t write culture into a policy, and you can’t buy it in before an inspection. It shows up in who stays, who leaves, and what your staff do on a Sunday night when nobody senior is in the building.

Samantha Crawley built EQ Care Group from the ground up. Ruth French has spent a career taking services from Requires Improvement to Outstanding. In this session they compare notes on the thing that sits underneath both jobs — and on how often it is the first thing sacrificed when a business is growing fast or firefighting.

Expect a frank conversation rather than two presentations: what they each got wrong early on, the warning signs that a culture is drifting before the turnover figures show it, how you hold a set of values together across sites and a dispersed workforce, and why an Outstanding rating is usually the symptom of something that was built long before the inspector arrived.

With the Fair Pay Agreement reshaping the workforce conversation and recruitment still the sector’s hardest problem, they will also take on the uncomfortable question: whether culture is what you have left when you cannot compete on pay.