West Midlands Care Association Training Needs Survey

December 2018

West Midlands Care Association (WMCA) is the one of 47 local care associations in England. As our name implies, we concentrate on providing membership services and representation across the county of the West Midlands. We also run and administer the Worcestershire Care Association and provide back office services to the Derbyshire Care Providers Association and Nottinghamshire Care Association.

Late last year (2018) in response to member feedback we began to look at the possibility of commissioning our own training courses again. This is something we had done in the past but not for some years. We have formed partnerships with over a dozen different training providers, but as we were unsure about what the possible training needs of our membership, we put together a survey. It was also around this time that we first started to have conversations with the Skills for Care Locality managers about the upcoming WFD tendering process and whether we thought we should bid for it. We therefore expanded the questionnaire slightly and rewrote it in line with WFD priorities.

We currently have around 462 members and the survey was sent to all. We had 48 respond to the survey (10.4% of our membership) which we feel is a representative sample.

Here is a summary of our findings.

Employer Size

The West Midlands and Worcestershire has nearly 2000 Care Providers, the bulk of whom (particularly in Birmingham) are made up of large national chains. WMCA’s membership is made up mainly of small and medium sized independent providers, with nearly 60% classed as Medium

Employer Size

Micoproviders Small Medium

The County of the West Midlands is made up of 7 separate Metropolitan Borough Councils (Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall, Wolverhampton) and Worcestershire 1 County Council. Historically the Association began in the Black Country (Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton) and correspondingly our membership is strongest there. Worcestershire Care Association has a history going back 30 years so again this is another area with a strong membership.

Geographic Area

Dudley Sandwell Walsall Wolverhampton Birmingham Worcestershire Coventry Solhull

Unsurprisingly the largest proportion of respondents were from the Black County and Worcestershire. Birmingham is the largest local authority in Europe and only slightly smaller than the 4 Black Country areas combined. Although we do have a strong membership in Birmingham, as previously noted the care market in the city is dominated by large national providers who will more than likely use existing mechanisms to bid for Workforce Development Funding. We therefore intend to concentrate our efforts initially on Micro/Small and Medium sized providers in the Black Country and Worcestershire. As our association area covers the whole of the counties of West Midlands and Worcestershire, we didn’t want our WDF area to be segmented as this will cause confusion amongst our existing membership and other care providers.

Training Needs

The original intent of this survey as previously stated was to identify the potential training needs of our members in order to look at possibly commission training to fulfil this. Care Staff Currently Training for Diploma

Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 5

We asked whether staff were currently studying for the Diploma and at what level. Unsurprising the vast bulk are studying at level 2 and 3 with the remainder at level 5 (strangely no one indicated that anyone was studying at level 4 but we believe this to be a statistical anomaly of the sample data)

We asked providers to indicate their potential training needs over the next year. We did not concentrate solely on WFD funded courses as our original survey had broader training aims.

Training Needs (WFD Funded)

120 100 80 60 40 20 0

Unsurprisingly given the number of staff currently studying at level 2, providers have indicated that the Level 2 Diploma (standalone) will likely be the most popular of the WFD awards.

Training Needs (Other)

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Other training needs are more broadly based, and this is something the association will look at as a separate matter (our Compliance and Record Keeping course is already proving popular).

Conclusion

As previously stated, the counties of the West Midlands and Worcestershire have nearly 2000 care providers so the potential audience for WFD funding is huge. The West Midlands Care Association is an established and trusted local care association which has the necessary reach and resources to carry this out.

Our survey findings would indicate that a WFD partnership within this area is very viable and more importantly scalable in subsequent years.

As we do not have any historic WFD partnership data to go on, we would plan to initially look at a conservative bid concentrating on the areas of the Black Country and Worcestershire (but open to all) where we feel we have the most influence.