Care Workforce Development Partnership

The Care Workforce Development Partnership had its third meeting on November 26th at The Dormy Care Home, Sunningdale. Dormy is part of the Aria Care Group and this was the first time that we’ve held a meeting at an employer’s premises. This was a deliberate decision to help with one of our key aims – building ever stronger links between local care providers and local colleges and independent training providers. To that end we also invited students to the meeting for the first time. We had a range of students attend from Windsor Forest Colleges Group, Activate Learning and The Henley College.

The student presence at the meeting was a great success. They were able to start with a tour of the home and then spent time with department heads learning more about the range of roles which exist within a care home setting. They then joined the main meeting for our roundtable discussion on the skills needs of the sector, its recruitment challenges and what more we can do to meet these. The student input into these discussions was a real revelation and reinforced the importance of increasing their understanding of opportunities in Adult Social Care. Several said that these opportunities were often less clear to them than those in the health service. They spoke eloquently about the fact that there was less information about the care sector in the media, some negative perceptions of it and a lack of visible role models. Several said they would now look more closely at opportunities in the sector after this event.

The rest of the meeting saw a range of employers, colleges, training providers and sector bodies hear the latest updates on sector developments from Rachel Reid (Skills for Care). We also heard about the success of the National Care Careers Event run by the Hallmark Foundation and their Head of Programmes and Partnerships, Roxy Potts. The Sector-based Work Academy Programmes (SWAPs) model was outlined by James Gilpin from the Department for Work and Pensions. This enables employers to take advantage of flexible, funded six-week placements of adults seeking work through the DWP and Job Centre Plus.

A range of actions will now be taken forward by the group These will include examining the possibility of a regional care careers event and expansion of the SWAPs model take up in the region. As well as the recruitment of local workforce strategy champions for the sector and further analysis of the numbers of students studying on health and social care programmes in the region.

It was also decided that the next meeting should again be run in a care setting. It will take place at The Close Care Home in Oxfordshire, which is run by our Employer Champion, Sanjay Dhrona. We will continue to invite students to the event and use it to keep building links between employers, training providers and their learners.