Professor Martin Green OBE, Chief Executive of Care England, explores how social care can attract, develop and retain talent by creating clear career pathways, challenging outdated perceptions and positioning care as a profession that offers long-term opportunities for growth and progression.
The social care sector has struggled for many years with recruitment and retention. Currently, there are over 111,000 vacancies, and a turnover rate in excess of 35%. This is not good for any sector, but for social care, where we rely on relationship-based care and a deep understanding of the people we support, such a turnover rate combined with a recruitment gap, leads to a lack of continuity in the care we provide and loads of huge transactional costs on the organisation.
Over the years, the Department of Health and Social Care has focused solely on the NHS workforce, leaving social care a poor relation. We cannot compete with the salary levels or the huge training and development budgets available to NHS employers, so we must craft different ways to make our sector attractive. Many social care employers have realised that they have to make care an attractive destination for people entering the workforce. Over the years, there have been a range of different initiatives, many of which have proved very successful. Firstly, we need to address the issue of language. All too often, people talk about jobs in the care sector, but we must underscore that this is a complex area of work that requires a range of values and skills, and it is a career, not a job. To change people’s perceptions, we must take tangible steps to make the sector more attractive to younger people and to make it a destination for those considering a career change.
Some years ago, a group of us in the sector came together to develop “Care First”, which was based on the successful Teach First Programme, which was getting high-flyers into teaching. The government supported this initiative and rolled it out to other parts of the government, such as the Home Office. However, despite strong support within the sector, the Government refused to back an initiative for care workers. This underscores that governments view social care as second-class to government services and are not prepared to provide support for the workforce. Faced with this reality, the sector must leave the agenda to us, and we must ensure we create opportunities to develop careers in social care.
We need clear skills and competency frameworks and portable qualifications because the sector’s diversity of employers means people need to be able to move across organisations to develop their careers. There have been attempts to do this with the development of the care certificate, but these have not been as successful as they might have been, partly because they were not backed by the same training and development monies that go into the public sector.
One of the things that social care really can offer is a great career pathway, and there are countless examples in our sector of people who are currently sitting behind the chief executive’s desks in large organisations, who started their lives as care workers. These are success stories that the sector should be proud of, and we should champion these people as examples of where careers can develop in social care.
We should also acknowledge that the world of work is changing, and people want more flexibility in their work patterns. As a 24/7 sector, we can offer this, and we must be creative in our approach and provide people with flexibility. One large employer has focused on attracting early retirees into care, and this has proved very successful. These people do not want full-time or even traditional part-time roles, but they do want quality of the work experience. What this employer has found is that if you offer these people flexible working, they’re more than happy to do more shifts if the service requires it, and so, in effect, they have created their own bank within their staff team
Social care offers so many brilliant opportunities to develop careers, and we now need to start championing these and ensuring that everybody knows social care is a destination of choice for a long-term, successful career. We will always need people in our sector, and as the economy changes, we could be one of the few sectors that offer good quality work and a career for life.
