Professor Martin Green OBE, Chief Executive, Care England
The future of social care is precarious. Successive governments have seen social care only in the context of its subsidiary relationship to the NHS. Over many years, they have ignored the need for fundamental reform and for significant extra resources to be put into the system.
This has led to many challenges, not least our ability to retain and recruit staff to deliver high-quality and complex care. The staff in social care are real professionals, and they certainly showed this during the pandemic, when their level of skills, knowledge and commitment was very evident. It is quite clear that people in our sector are driven by values and work in this sector in order to make a difference in people’s lives rather than because they can earn money. The way in which successive governments have played upon the commitment of social care staff is quite shameful, and we need to rewrite our approach to how we train, reward, and respect our colleagues in social care in order to deliver a sustainable future.
If you look at the makeup of the social care workforce, many people will be retiring from their roles within the next five years. One of the things it is vital that we do is to think about how we attract both younger people into our sector and also how we make it an attractive sector for people who want to move careers at the midpoint in their working life. It must be remembered that it is not only money that drives some of these people to think about career changes. It is often the need for more flexibility and a better work-life balance, as well as the feeling that you are doing something that is making a difference to people’s lives.
In order to attract both new entrances into our sector and those who are making career moves, we need to do the following. Firstly, we need a very clear skills and competency framework and a set of portable qualifications this will give people a real understanding of how they can progress in their careers. We also need some very clear career pathways and some good examples of people who have entered social care and have built really good careers in the sector. I am sure that Skills For Care would be more than able to develop this comprehensive approach to qualifications, and what we need is for the government to give them the resources and free them up to redefine the training and development structures in our sector.
In order to attract people who are making midpoint career moves and transferring from other sectors, we need to have some understanding of how we can recognise some of the qualifications that they have and also have some training that will transfer them from where they are into the social care sector.
Another thing that we need to do is to get our current workforce to be ambassadors and champions for our sector and encourage people they know to join our workforce. Neil Eastwood has written extensively on this issue and has some great insights for employers on how to both retain current staff and also attract new ones.
What gives me confidence about the future is not what the government will do; rather, it is because of the resources and talent that we have within our sector. I have seen some great examples of organisations that have developed innovative and creative ideas on how to both recruit and retain their staff. In an economy where there is nearly full employment, we have got to think differently about how we attract new people and how we retain our current colleagues. We also need to be fishing in different pools of talent and making sure that social care is a destination of choice for people at various points in their careers.
Many people have had caring responsibilities and who could make an enormous contribution to our sector, but who, for various other reasons, might not want to work full, or indeed part-time, but who could give a number of shifts to service and really help to establish a pool of people who could be used to fill gaps. There is a huge problem with agencies working in our sector, and the cost of this is spiralling to unsustainable levels. It is for this reason that we need to develop new ways of attracting and retaining our staff and think about how we create our own pool of talent rather than having to go to expensive outside organisations to acquire it.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way in which many people work, and our sector needs to modernise its approach and think about how it can use technology and different work patterns as ways of attracting new entrance to our sector and retaining those who have already shown their commitment through the global pandemic.
@ProfMartinGreen
@CareEngland
