Lucy Horton, 24, from Leeds had been working in a pub kitchen: “You know, really making a difference,” she says, rolling her eyes. She’d been considering care work for some time but was put off by the need for experience and, in many cases, the need for a car. “I was down at the job centre,” she says, “looking at an ad to work at Tesco but I really didn’t want to.” Then an advert for care work caught her eye and she went along to a presentation.
“It was warts and all, and so honest and refreshing. Nobody was trying to sell the job to me,” she says. The pros seemed to outweigh the cons for her so she joined Leeds city council’s We Care scheme, enrolling on a two-week training course at Barnsley College, followed by four weeks’ work experience.
Now Horton works for Aspire Community Benefit Society, a staff-led mutual providing adult learning disability services and is, she says, “loving it”. For Horton, the barriers to the role were removed and instead she was recruited on her suitability for the job, based on a values-based profiling system.
The We Care Academy was set up two years ago by June Rollins, senior organisational development officer of Leeds council adult social care, in partnership with JobCentre Plus and Barnsley College. Rollins says: “I attended a lot of sector meetings – private, independent and third-sector – and they were all having issues with retaining and attracting quality [staff].”
She adds: “It’s the same across the whole sector. Getting the right people with the right values who want this as a career.” She says she had also spoken to many schools interested in care career pathways. Skills for Care told her about its I Care ambassador programme and a partnership was born. The initial focus was on the specific (and hard to recruit) roles of community support worker and care assistant for older people but, says Rollins, this is likely to widen in the future.
The values-based recruitment system (based on Skills For Care’s “a question of care” toolkit) determines how potential candidates promote service users’ dignity and independence. “We don’t want people who just want a job,” Rollins adds, explaining that assessments are also made by video link – “It tells us what we can work with,” she says.
The assessment process requires applicants to express themselves in writing and numeracy is useful because they might be dealing with fluid balance charts and weight charts. But,says Barnsley College tutor Adi Benson: “We do offer extra [literacy and numeracy] help for people we think have the right skills and who really want it.”
Each cohort is a maximum of 13 (due to moving and handling training restrictions) and so far there have been 14 cohorts. The retention rate is impressive. “So far most have gone on to work, either with the original organisation, or they’ve moved on,” says Rollins. “I can only think of one gentleman who moved out of the sector entirely.”
One of the appeals of the scheme is that Leeds city council funds the portable disclosure and barring service checks on criminal records, which are costly. Rollins says: “If you’re taking on a new member of staff it can cost around £3,500 so we take on that hassle for the employer.”
The scheme has been so successful that it bagged the winners of winners trophy at the Skills for Care accolades this year. The awards honour the best employers in adult social care and judges were impressed with the scheme’s high retention rates. Its new We Care health and social care apprenticeship programme, which started in July, is for Leeds applicants between the ages of 18 and 24 and results in a one-year apprenticeship with support to complete a full health and social care diploma (level 2 or 3). Leeds has also been approached to share its learning with other councils.
Skills for Care estimates there are 1.52 million jobs in the adult social care sector, currently being carried out by 1.45 million workers. Churn is an issue, with an overall turnover rate of 25.4% (which equates to around 300,000 workers leaving their role every year). So schemes like this are great news, for the sector and its keen workers such as Horton, who says: “Any qualifications, I’ll do them. I have basically said, ‘Send me to school!’”
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