Every client we speak with tells us they could benefit from access to more funding to help deliver their training – so why are almost 90% of care providers not accessing the Workforce Development Fund (WDF).
So let’s start with some basics.
Skills for Care is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and keeps its specific Workforce Development Fund allocation closely guarded. However, in 2012 the Workforce Development Fund was valued at around £13m according to a Department of Health impact assessment and so allowing for inflation alone, the fund should now be in excess of £15m (as a rough educated guess) – not an amount that should be readily ignored by anyone!
Secondly, Skills for Care state that around 2,000 organisations actually claim WDF funding, which on the face of it sounds positive, until you remind yourself that there are actually around 20,000 organisations operating via almost 40,000 services within the sector – and it’s usually at the local service level that funding is claimed!
Even more bizarrely, it’s often the small and medium-sized organisations that continue to miss out on this grant funding – which just doesn’t make financial sense. OK, we get that it comes with some administrative overheads, but cash is cash, right? We’ve been working with our clients for years helping them to make the most of this funding, in fact, we reckon we’ve helped our clients secure in excess of £250,000 of WDF – and that’s helped them deliver a lot of training and qualifications.
The bottom line is you need to understand how to maximise this opportunity and we can show you how with real-life examples. We can even show you how you can cross-fund your time-consuming and costly induction and refresher training using our unique “WDF funded licence model”.
If you’d like to find out a little more, contact us for an initial chat and we’ll be happy to share some more insights into how we’ve made this work for our clients. We can also have a quick chat about how it might work for your organisation – what have you got to lose?