Edgeworks Care Academy allows award-winning UK provider of live-in care services to offer a committed and flexible career development pathway with formal qualifications

Their goal is to allow older people to live in their own homes for as long as possible which often provides a better alternative to care homes. Services include 24-hour live-in care, day care and a respite service.

All carers are employed directly by the company. They have a policy of not using agency staff. To ensure the quality of the people they employ, they have a rigorous recruitment process where only 5% of those who apply for positions get to join the team. But if successful, carers are then supported via an unrivalled induction training programme and on-going professional development. The company is also serious about offering staff a structured career development pathway with pre-defined gateways to success and higher financial rewards.

Louise Joslin, Head of Learning and Development explains: “Before we started working with Care Academy, our biggest training challenge was keeping up to date with changing legislation and making sure all our staff were fully compliant with the sector regulations. Because of the nature of our work, we need to make sure every person that we place in a client company has all the necessary qualifications and mandatory certificates in place. We need to manage the ongoing training needs of entry-level support staff through to experienced support workers. We also have to train health care assistants, nurses, managers and team leaders.

We have been working with Care Academy for five years and their innovative system allows us to offer fully accredited Diploma courses, which are excellent for team motivation and career advancement.

In particular, their Level 2 Diploma ‘Working in Care Services’ is unique and helps us to deliver on-going training at a time to suit our learners, without the time and resource issues associated with traditional observations, assessors and external training providers.

It also lets our staff know that we’re investing in their future as well as our own. From a budgeting perspective, we can take advantage of Workforce Development Funding to help offset the costs and the system even automatically delivers the completed funding claim forms to our central administrator – it truly is a win-win for everyone.

Recently, one of our live in carers, Elisabete De Jesus Macedo De Azevedo decided that she wanted to develop her career by taking a Level 2 Diploma in Working in Care Services. Keen to progress her career, Elisabete was highly motivated and was eager to enroll as soon as possible – we didn’t appreciate how motivated she was until after her enrolment. Normally this kind of qualification would take somewhere between 2-3 months and would need around 100 hours of study time to meet the stringent assessment criteria and be awarded the Diploma.

After completing the simple online enrolment, Elisabete started the course in earnest, working her way through the learning and assessments and just 17 days later she successfully completed the course and was awarded the Level 2 Diploma. We’re immensely proud of her achievement and commitment and she is a great example of what our carers are capable of when they are fully supported.

We’re also pleased because it backs up our belief that Care Academy is an ideal platform to enable our carers to learn at their own pace. Elisabete’s achievement shows that if someone is serious about taking ownership of their own career development, they can push ahead at a pace that works for them. Elisabete is keen to enrol on further qualifications and is keeping Good Care Group and Care Academy on their toes!

Moving forward, we are continuing to delivering level 2 Diplomas and are currently working with Care Academy to see how we can introduce Level 3 qualifications as part of our integrated career development pathway.”