We’re delighted to announce that FuturU’s social care learning is now endorsed by Skills for Care – a mark of quality given only to the very best learning and development providers within the adult social care sector, and the ultimate stamp of approval that the training we deliver leads to better quality of life outcomes for the individuals our learners care for.
To find out more about what the Skills for Care endorsement means for FuturU, our team and our learners, we sat down with Vicki Kot, our Learning Experience Design Manager. Vicki leads our Content Creation Team of instructional designers and developers to develop healthcare training courses that transform information and content into engaging scenario-led learning experiences.
In this article, Vicki explains exactly what the Skills for Care endorsement is and how we became endorsed. She also outlines how we assure the quality of all the training we offer and the processes in place to continually improve what we do.
Who are Skills for Care?
Skills for Care is the strategic workforce development and planning body for adult social care in England. Working with employers, Government and partners, it’s their job to ensure that the very highest quality care and support is provided to those who need it.
Skills for Care sets the standards for social care. And that includes the training that’s provided by learning providers like FuturU.
What does this endorsement mean?
Being endorsed by Skills for Care is a real badge of honour and stamp of approval – it tells the world that we follow the right processes, that the social care learning we provide is of the highest quality, and that it’s sourced in the right way.
It’s proof that we have rigorous processes in place and that we’re doing things the right way. For the team, it’s awesome to have this acknowledgement that what we’re doing meets the requirements set by Skills for Care, and that all our hard work really is making a difference. And for our learners and partners, it’s an assurance that the social care training they’re getting from FuturU is of the highest quality.
How do you become a Skills for Care endorsed provider?
We kicked off the process around five months ago. Skills for Care needed to take an in-depth look at all of our processes to ensure we met the standards required for endorsement.
There was plenty of evidence that we needed to provide, including:
- How we engage with the adult social care sector to understand their needs, and how these needs influence the training we create
- Our content development process
- How we source, vet and review our subject matter experts
- How we train and develop our team and ensure their knowledge remains up to date
- An explanation of our quality assurance processes, and how they drive the quality of what we offer, help to develop our learners and improve the quality of life for people accessing care
- Written feedback from learners on the training they’ve completed with FuturU, and how we act on feedback we receive to ensure it meets their needs
- Written feedback from organisations that we work with
- Written feedback from subject matter experts.
How do we ensure the quality of the training we deliver?
There’s a lot to it! It’s all about continually reviewing and improving our processes and the training we deliver.
From a subject matter expert perspective, we work hard to ensure that the people providing us with information for our training are qualified to the right level, that they have enough experience within a topic and that they’re fully referencing the information they provide us.
We peer review all our content – that means everything we do is reviewed by a minimum of two subject matter experts before it’s published.
And once it’s published, that content goes into a rigorous review schedule to ensure it remains correct and up to date.
The learner is at the heart of everything we do, and we’ll speak to them regularly to understand what they want and need, and check that the training we provide is working for them. We hold a monthly feedback meeting, where we review the feedback we’ve received from learners completing courses.
Of course, the content needs to be correct, but we also want it to be engaging and enjoyable! And one of the ways we do that is through story-led scenario-based training that really contextualises the information being shared, and enables the learner to put what they’re learning into practice in real life. It’s a big differentiator for us.
