Skills For Care Chair Seeks Government Support

At the recent Leitch Review Briefing, Skills for Care Chair, Donald Hoodless OBE asked Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education and Skills, to consider giving full control of Train to Gain funding to Skills for Care. 

The appropriate allocation of Train to Gain funding for employers to train staff is integral to the successful delivery of Lord Leitch’s recently published vision for skills improvement throughout the UK.

Skills for Care has extensive experience of allocating the Train to Gain budget to social care employers throughout the South East region.  It has also proven its success in allocating Training Strategy Implementation (TSI) funding to social care employers to support NVQs and induction of new staff throughout England.  

Donald Hoodless comments: “Skills for Care has repeatedly proven its ability to broker funds for training successfully, providing a one-stop shop supply service for Care Associations and enabling them to achieve their targets.  Our services particularly support the needs of smaller care providers who would otherwise struggle with the bureaucracy and red tape that surrounds funding for staff development.  Skills for Care’s model works, and could be rolled out throughout England for a commonsense, consistent and joined up approach.”

Following  his comments at the briefing, Hoodless is now writing to the Secretary of State to further clarify Skills for Care’s proposal to bring control of the Train to Gain budget under its remit.  

In the South East region, Skills for Care already runs a very successful £2.1m European Social Fund brokerage project with the Learning and Skills Council.  All Train to Gain activity for social care organisations in the region is delivered by Skills for Care’s own brokerage service as opposed to the generic Train to Gain brokerage.

The major benefit of this is that the funds are allocated by people with an in depth knowledge and understanding of employers’ specific needs in the social care sector.  Skills for Care now wants this highly successful model emulated throughout the other regions of England, and feels its network of nine regional committees are ideally placed to deliver this vision.

According to Leitch, more than one in six young people leave school unable to read, write or add up properly.  The Leitch Review outlines the need to route all adult vocational skills funding through Train to Gain and Learner Accounts by 2010.  As the employer-led body for adult social care workforce development, Skills for Care is ideally placed to allocate the funds for training to help achieve Leitch’s long term aim
throughout the social care sector.
     
Hoodless concludes: “Skills for Care’s funding is already an essential lever to enable the sector to acquire the necessary skills and qualifications to deliver improvements in social care, and this expertise should be maximized to ensure Train to Gain is a success.”