Social care employers face growing workforce expectations, yet the funding system often overlooks the biggest barriers to training. We examine where current funding falls short, why it matters, and practical changes that could make workforce development more achievable.
A declaration of interest up front, and it matters more in this piece than the others. I run a workforce development business that delivers training and qualifications in adult social care. Some of what I argue below would benefit providers like mine. But our model is built on the opposite of dependence: helping employers build their own capability so they need people like me less. Read it with all of that in mind. I’ve tried to make the case ‘Employer-First’, because that’s where it has the maximum impact.
In Part 2 of my “joining the dots series”, I set out the arithmetic: at the rate the system currently qualifies people, the ASC Workforce Strategy’s 80% Level 2 target isn’t years away, it’s out of reach entirely.
On Skills for Care’s own most recent data, just 36% of direct care staff are qualified at Level 2 or 3, and the report’s foreword concedes qualification levels are falling, even as roles grow more complex. At the same time, the international recruitment that has masked the sector’s headcount problem is being switched off. Fewer qualified people, a shrinking recruitment pool, a target the maths won’t support.
So the obvious question is: where does the capacity to close that gap come from? And the frustrating answer is that some of it already exists, employers are already paying for it, but the system has been built so they can’t use it for this.
Let me show you what I mean, because it’s a near-perfect illustration of the disconnect I’ve been describing.
The main funding route for training the adult social care workforce is the Learning and Development Support Scheme (LDSS). It reimburses employers for eligible training and qualifications, and for 2026/27 it is capped at £400,000 per organisation across the year.
£400,000 sounds generous until you divide it. For the Level 2 Adult Social Care Certificate, reimbursement is capped at £1,540 per individual, so that ceiling funds training for roughly 260 people in a year, regardless of whether you employ 300 staff or 3,000. Larger employers hit the cap within months and then fund everything else themselves. But the cap isn’t the real tell. This is: the scheme explicitly will not reimburse staff backfill pay, travel, or costs ancillary to the training.
Think about that, because it’s the whole argument in one line. Everyone who has ever run a care service will tell you the barrier to qualifying staff is rarely the price of the course. It’s the cost of releasing someone to do it, the shift you have to cover, often with agency, while they learn. That is the cost that stops training happening, and the national scheme designed to fund training refuses to cover it.
Here’s the kicker: the previous scheme got it right. Under the Workforce Development Fund (WDF), which LDSS replaced, employers could claim not just the course but the costs that actually make training possible, wage replacement to bring in cover, travel, assessor time, even the learner’s salary while they studied. The redesign kept the cheapest component, the course, and quietly discarded the rest.
So I’m not asking for a bigger cheque. I’m asking why a scheme that recognised the true cost of developing a care worker was replaced by one that pretends the only cost is the course fee. That is the disconnect in miniature: a rule rewritten at a distance from the consequence of changing it, by people who, I suspect, never had to cover a shift to send someone on a course.
And there’s a number that makes the redesign harder to defend. Skills for Care’s own commissioned evaluation of WDF put its economic return at £5.81 for every £1 invested, a net present value of nearly £110 million across two years. This wasn’t a failing scheme that needed replacing. It was a scheme that funded the real cost of training, and returned almost six to one, and we swapped it for one that funds less and asks the employer to carry the risk. And, alarmingly, Skills for Care is now quietly canvassing training providers to ask why enrolment rates are falling.
It isn’t only what the scheme funds, it’s how. LDSS reimburses, which means the employer pays first and claims later. Every pound of risk sits with the provider of care. There is no published running total of what remains in the pot, so you commit your own money upfront without knowing whether the funding is still there to claim against, you find out only after you’ve paid and applied. It’s a form of financial roulette that no one running a tight service should have to play. And if the member of staff leaves before completing, in a sector with turnover like ours, a real prospect, the employer is left holding the bill.
A scheme structured like this doesn’t just underfund training. It quietly transfers the entire financial risk of workforce development onto the party least able to absorb it, and then records low uptake as if it were a mystery.
There’s a quieter loss in the redesign, too. WDF was distributed through regional partners who helped employers navigate applications, understand what they could claim, and keep the audit trail straight. That support was one of the features employers rated most highly in the fund’s own evaluation, and one they feared losing when the scheme changed. They were right to. Stripping out the people who helped employers actually use the funding, and replacing them with a claim-blind digital process, is symptomatic of everything else here: a system redesigned for administrative tidiness at the centre, at the cost of usability at the front line.
Now the second pot. Larger care employers, anyone over £3 million of payroll, pay the levy, now rebranded the Growth and Skills Levy. For years the complaint has been that it could only fund full apprenticeships, which, in a high-turnover sector, are hard to complete, so the money often sat unspent until it expired.
In April 2026 that changed, and on paper it changed in exactly the direction social care needs. The reformed levy now funds “apprenticeship units“, short, modular chunks of training of 30 to 140 hours, drawn from existing apprenticeship standards, live for new starts from 28 April 2026. Modular, stackable, fundable from money employers already pay. If you were designing a route to qualify a care workforce in bite-sized, completable steps, this is close to what you’d draw.
Except social care can’t use it, because of two locks on the same door.
The first wave of units covers eight areas, AI, engineering, construction, energy, that sort of thing. There is no adult social care unit. The sector with one of the largest workforce challenges in the country has been left out of the very flexibility built to address workforce challenges.
The second lock is the one that ought to trouble anyone worried about the supply of training in this sector. Even where a relevant unit exists, delivery is restricted to providers already on the Apprenticeship Provider and Assessment Register (APAR) who are actively delivering the standards the units are drawn from, and subcontracting is banned outright. So a provider approved by Skills for Care’s own quality-assurance service to deliver the Level 2 Adult Social Care Certificate, but not sitting on the apprenticeship register delivering the matching qualification, is locked out of the modular route entirely. Can’t deliver it. Can’t even subcontract into it.
I’ll declare the obvious: my own organisation is on the wrong side of that line, so I have an interest in it moving. But look past me for a second, because the sector-level point is the serious one. The government’s own ASC Workforce Strategy leans towards routing quality assurance through that same QACLS gateway, a direction that will already stretch many smaller providers. So we have one arm of policy pushing specialist care providers towards a care-specific quality standard, while another arm hands the new funded delivery route exclusively to apprenticeship providers, some of whom may deliver no social care at all. The people who wrote those two rules were, I’d wager, never in the same room. That is the disconnect, made concrete: a supply-side training base that is already under strain, being narrowed further by rules that don’t see each other.
There is a chink of light. The department says it may widen the eligible provider group later in 2026, once it has monitored delivery. Good. But “may, later, once we’ve watched” is not a plan for a sector losing qualified people now.
I want to be straight about the part that cuts against me directly, because a serious argument names its own weak point.
It would be easy to say “just let care employers spend their stranded levy on the Level 2 Certificate and we’re done.” It isn’t that simple. At a national level the levy pot is not a reservoir of unspent cash, it has been fully committed, even overspent, for the last couple of years. So this can’t be framed as free money lying around. Two things are true at once: individual employers routinely fail to spend their own balances before they expire, and from August 2026 new funds expire in 12 months, not 24, which makes that worse, while the national pot is maxed. Redirecting funds towards social care therefore means genuine prioritisation, not a costless reshuffle. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Naming that difficulty doesn’t dissolve the case, though, if anything it clarifies what the case actually is. The question was never “is there spare money lying around?” It’s this: given a fixed pot that employers are already paying into and struggling to spend, why is the sector with the deepest workforce need the one locked out of the flexible route to using it?
Joining these particular dots: four practical changes
So here is what connecting these dots would actually look like. None of it is radical. All of it is within the gift of the people who wrote the rules.
The biggest barrier to qualifying the workforce isn’t willingness, it’s the cost of releasing staff to learn. Every hour a worker spends training is an hour that must be covered, often with agency staff. The previous funding scheme, the Workforce Development Fund, recognised this: it reimbursed wage replacement, travel and associated costs, not just the course fee. Its successor scheme dropped them. National funding for Level 2 and Level 3 pathways should be designed around the true cost of training in a high-turnover, low-margin sector, as it once was.
Larger employers can easily exhaust their LDSS allocation within months, then watch levy funds they can’t easily deploy expire unused. Two pots, one starved, one stranded, with no bridge between them. The funding streams supporting workforce development should be reviewed and connected, so employers can direct the funding they already pay towards the qualifications the sector actually needs.
The reformed levy now funds short, modular apprenticeship units, but the first wave covers AI, engineering, construction and energy, not social care. A sector facing one of the country’s largest workforce challenges has been left out of the very flexibility designed to address workforce challenges. Adult social care should be prioritised in the next wave of units, and the Level 2 Adult Social Care Certificate made deliverable in modular, levy-fundable form.
The provider base is contracting even as demand rises. Part of the answer is enabling more quality-assured delivery. But the more durable answer is building qualification and assessment capability within employers themselves, so the sector depends less on a third-party market that keeps shrinking. Funded delivery routes should recognise and support employer-led and employer-embedded delivery, with proper quality safeguards, so capacity grows where the workforce actually is.
Across this series, I’ve tried to trace one common thread. The sector sets a workforce ambition. The maths shows the ambition is unreachable at the current capacity. And when you look for the levers that might close the gap, you find them, but disconnected, mis-pointed, or locked to the people who need them most. A scheme that won’t fund the thing that stops training. A levy that could help, closed to the sector and its specialist providers. Two pots, no bridge.
None of this requires a villain. It requires someone to stand far enough back to see the whole chain at once, and to join the dots between the ambition and the means of delivering it. That someone doesn’t obviously exist in the system as currently built, which is why I’ve come to think employers, providers and the people who actually carry this work may have to be the ones who do it.
The four changes above aren’t the wishes of any single organisation. They’re drawn from the conversations with employers and training providers that sit behind this whole series, and I want to stress-test them against the experience of anyone with a stake in this. If you run a care service, deliver training into the sector, or carry this work on the front line, I’d genuinely like to hear whether these ring true, what’s missing, and what you’d change.
You can reach me on LinkedIn or via EdgeWorks™ contact us page. If enough of the sector says the same things, that’s worth putting in front of the people who write the rules, and I’ll come back to how we might do that together.
Steve Helsby is a co-founder at EdgeWorks™
Who speaks for the social care workforce? It’s 2026, and I’m still not sure it’s Skills for Care
Why the Adult Social Care Workforce Strategy’s 80% qualification target is mathematically impossible