5 September 2010 Good Evening

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The implications for the social care workforce of Self Directed Support

The Aims and Objectives of the Activity

• To identify the key workforce policy issues and explore how these need to adapt in the light of self directed support and individual budgets.
• To create a number (6 minimum) of action learning sets that draw out the learning from existing individual / personal budgets projects, and cover the range of existing and new types of workers. Ensuring a link to a research faculty.
• To deliver a range of publishable material that informs workforce strategy in relation to this area of work and which provides practical tools for people implementing these models of support.

Context/Background

Personalisation has the potential to firmly place people in their communities as full and active citizens.

It is a big challenge to the existing social care workforce, but is also a great opportunity to get the right people, doing the right roles, with good outcomes in people's lives.

The research and development required to identify what exactly are these new models of support has not yet fully been done.

A person's citizenship is about more than professional support, so we will be talking to professionals, community groups, and individuals and their families. These 3 groups represent the three circles of people who must be present to influence the development of a workforce strategy. All the people we speak to will be making personalisation happen either as support providers, local authorities, micro-enterprises, or in their own lives. Before the meetings, we agreed that the questions we would ask would be:

1. Learning and development and accreditation
2. Leadership and management
3. Regulation - who is regulating what?
4. Funding - who pays for the learning?
5. HR / people management issues

What Happened (so far)

We have met with people across all of the 3 groups and spoken to them about what the workforce issues are as they make personalisation happen. We have written an interim report for Skills for Care. Our summary so far is:

• There is a gap between what families consider to be important when recruiting and retaining staff and the traditional priorities of regulators and service providers.
• All the sites visited so far agree that the learning that has been undertaken, or is available, does not adequately meet the needs of either the learner or the person being supported.
• A personalised approach to workforce development and learning is more likely to result in personalised services for people

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