When Hollie Stokes graduated three years ago with a degree in psychology and criminology, she wanted to apply some of what she’d learnt in a real-life setting. So she applied for a job as a support co-ordinator with the Avalon Group, a care charity that supports people with dementia, learning disabilities and mental health problems. It was a role that involved an element of practical care work with clients as well as some managerial responsibility.
Since starting the job, and finding that she loved it, Stokes has been promoted three times. At the age of 24 she is now a senior service manager, a demanding role that includes oversight of three other managers and a team of support co-ordinators. It’s not the usual graduate path. As Stokes says: “You don’t think of leaving university and then starting your first job as a carer.”
Historically, social care hasn’t tended to recruit from the graduate market. Zoe Elkins, head of care strategy at the Good Care Group, a private provider offering round-the-clock care in people’s own homes, says: “People in the social care sector are often developed from within. You often find that people who are fantastic carers will get promoted into more managerial positions, and they don’t always have the skills that would make them a great leader or great manager of people.”
But stories like Stokes’ may become more common as the social care sector starts to recruit graduates for roles previously undertaken by non-graduates. It’s a relatively slow trend, but Leslie Weare , director of health and care at recruitment agency Reed, says she has seen more graduates coming into the sector, particularly from psychology and related disciplines. They go into care roles directly related to aspects of their courses, such as mental health or prison work. “We have a vast generation of well-qualified caring people coming in at a graduate level,” she says.
So what’s changed? Partly as a result of an ageing population, the sector is growing. Social care organisations these days operate in an increasingly business-like environment that requires people with strong management skills, who can understand budgets and the requirements of regulator the Care Quality Commission.
The kinds of skills graduates bring can be immensely valuable. Jo Ross, assistant director of neurological services at care charity Sue Ryder, says: “They’ve got bright ideas and a fresh pair of eyes, and we increasingly need to be more innovative in the service we’re offering.”
Ross says that education to degree level is now a requirement for a number of posts at the charity: “The type of qualities people need to support care delivery tends to be critical thinking, analysis, political astuteness and commercial acumen. That’s just the nature of social care as a business, in its loosest term.”
And, says Julie Colley , director of operations, learning and marketing at the Avalon Group, graduates often have strong IT skills – essential in a role that requires data collection for evidence-based practice and CQC compliance.
Not all graduates go into caring roles. Duncan Lugton is an Oxford PPE (philosophy, politics and economics) graduate who is now a senior policy and campaigns officer for Sue Ryder, a job that requires strong analytical and research skills. “It’s helpful to have a generalist background, because one day I’ll be speaking to someone who’s phenomenally knowledgeable about neurological conditions but the next day I’ll be talking to someone whose specialisation is NHS project management,” he says.
Nonetheless, graduate intake is still patchy, with few social care organisations running graduate schemes. Skills for Care, the employer-led workforce development body for adult social care in England, is trying to change that through its graduate management training scheme. Now entering its sixth year, the scheme offers 20 graduates a year a fast track into management in partnership with social care organisations. Harriet Phillips, the scheme’s programme manager, says: “Social care is making a terrible mistake if we don’t take advantage of what the graduate market has to offer.”
The Good Care Group is one organisation that has benefited. Elkins says the two graduates the group has taken on through the scheme as care managers have “brought a new dynamic to our team”, adding: “They don’t accept the status quo, which is important to us because the care sector has the potential to be quite stagnant, and it’s really nice to have people who look at things with a fresh pair of eyes and say ‘why are you doing that like that, why don’t you try and do it like this?’.”
But more work needs to be done if graduates are to view social care as a natural choice. Phillips encourages graduates from the skills for care scheme to blog and write articles about their experience, and she wants the organisation to have a greater year-round presence at universities, rather than simply during recruitment cycles, so that there is an “obvious front door and route in for graduates”. As Elkins says: “There are so many issues and problems just waiting to be solved by somebody with a good head on their shoulders and a desire to make a difference.”
