Over recent years we have deepened our understanding of the issues and sectors we fund, through building stronger relationships with organisations and individuals and becoming more strategic about our grant-making.
This new approach is most developed in our funding of people in later life and their carers. Through our Better Careers for Better Care programme we are supporting better career and professional development opportunities for people working in care.
In this blog, our Programme Development Lead, Holly, shares more on the programme and reflects on a second round of grant-making.
Building on our strategic programme
Through Better Careers for Better Care, we are investing in people and organisations who want to do things differently in adult social care and put people at the heart of what they do: people who draw on care and support, their families, and care workers.
Over the past two years, we have made ten grants representing £2.4 million of funding, across England, Scotland and Wales. We have established programmatic learning with the support of Bean Research and regularly bring grant partners together in a community of practice. We have also funded work alongside Joseph Rowntree Foundation to convene national social care leaders in England to enable much needed reform of adult social care.
We are deeply impressed by the commitment, skill and resilience of our funded partners and proud that together we have been able to take this programme this far. We hope to use the evidence we are gathering to further influence key stakeholders including policymakers and government around the care agenda, and to demonstrate that enabling care workers to gain qualifications, experience and agency prevents crisis, provides essential support to families and communities, and supports people to live and age with dignity and respect.
Open call for Expressions of Interest
Learning from the programme so far shaped our second open funding call, launched in March. Applicants were asked to make clear how their work will build a culture of trust, respect and collaboration in adult social care, in order to enable and embed professional development opportunities for care workers. Specifically, we asked how proposed work will:
- Identify the blockers to embedding professional development opportunities and create collaborative solutions to address them;
- Build respectful and mutual relationships across different parts of the adult social care system;
- Bring professionals with different remits and priorities together to agree shared objectives and actions;
- Evidence the impact of collaborative cultures.
Other key assessment criteria included the potential for wider application and influence, the strength of partnership working, deliverability, sustainability, co-production and the approach to equity, diversity and inclusion. We hosted two information webinars attended by over 100 people in total to discuss the ambition, criteria and process of the open call and answer colleagues’ questions.
What came through the second open call
We received 62 applications. Each application was assessed by at least two of the grants team and a longlist of 13 applications was shared with the Assessment Panel. Deputy Director Susan and I met with the 13 longlisted applicants to bring the proposals to life, understand more about their approach to collaborative working and learning and to start a two-way conversation about the work going forward, challenges and dependencies. We then came together with the Assessment Panel to discuss the proposals and agreed a shortlist of six proposals to take forward to our Board for approval.
We were pleased that there was a wide geographical spread of proposals across England, Scotland and Wales, indicating that the opportunity had been shared beyond our own networks. We were also deeply impressed by the quality of the applications, with 40% scoring more than 70 out of 100. This showed us once again the extent of innovative thinking within adult social care and illustrated a significant need and demand for funding work that sits outside of ‘business-as-usual’.
The Assessment Panel
The Assessment Panel included two of our trustees, Rabbi Baroness Julia Neuberger and Miriam Rich, alongside five External Advisers bringing lived, learned and professional experience to our decision-making process, namely:
- Dr Clenton Farquharson CBE, Associate Director of Think Local Act Personal and Lead for Lived Experience at the IMPACT Centre.
- Deborah Sturdy, Chief Nurse for Adult Social Care, Department of Health and Social Care.
- Hannah Reseigh-Lincoln, Support Worker for Aston Care and volunteer member of the Care Workers’ Charity and Homecare Voices Advisory Boards.
- Kate Sibson, Head of Commissioning, Adults and Health Directorate, Leeds City Council.
- Sue-Ann Nnamani, Registered Manager, Priscilla Wakefield House and Co-Chair of the North Central London Care Leaders Forum.
The panel members not only supported us in the assessment of the applications but also in shaping the funding criteria and process from the outset and we are deeply grateful for their time, expertise and wisdom.
Support Worker Hannah, shared her experience as a panel member:
I really enjoyed my first experience of being part of an assessment panel, representing the view of care workers. I found the review process a challenge at first because so much thought had been put into each proposal I wanted to pick them all!
The review has also made me feel more positive about the future of adult social care. I’m really excited to see how the chosen projects get on and would love the chance to do something like this again in the future.
Panel member Clenton shared his reflections on the grants made:
What matters most is that the process has stayed true to its purpose: backing work that can genuinely improve the conditions in which care workers build their careers and working lives. I am particularly encouraged by the emphasis on co-production, meaningful system engagement and long-term change across the agreed grants. The focus on workforce voice, career development and the conditions needed to make progress stick feels exactly where the sector needs to be. The attention given to complementarity with the existing cohort and geographic spread is also important this is how individual grants can begin to add up to something more significant and create wider system change.
Grants made
In June, I brought the six shortlisted proposals to the Foundation’s trustee board for approval. All six proposals were enthusiastically supported by the trustees, and the following grants were agreed:
- Social Care Institute for Excellence and North West ADASS: Developing a Workforce Collaborative through embedding and scaling blended roles in adult social care
- Richmond and Wandsworth Councils, Stone King LLP, Wellspring Development Consultancy and Caremark: Reimagining homecare in the context of Neighbourhood Teams
- Leeds Health and Care Academy: a three‑part, system‑wide workforce development programme combining a Change Facilitator Pathway, a Multilevel Relational Skills Pathway, and Locality Based Collaborative Hubs
- Partners in Care: establishing an Independent Clinical Nurse Lead to transform professional development, clinical leadership and collaborative culture for care professionals in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin
- My Home Life England and the Care Providers Alliance: Delivering a National Leadership Programme in England to develop personal and collective leadership and create a shared vision and structure to support sustainable improvements in quality, collaboration and workforce wellbeing
- National Development Team for Inclusion: Delivering a UK-wide leadership programme for “potential leaver-leaders”, providing training in established best-practice leadership, exposure to exciting sector leaders and social entrepreneurs who have successfully challenged traditional delivery models, personal development support external to participants’ current organisation, and innovation tools to help them identify a route to senior leadership.
We are very excited to be alongside these organisations. Each programme of work is committed to creating social care and support that values, supports and invests in professional care workers, and ultimately works better for those of us who draw on care and support, our families and our communities. We believe that by continuing to invest in care workers and enabling collaborative working in a complex and often fragmented sector, we will contribute to a social care system that connects people with the lives they want and holds communities together. This investment benefits us all.
More detailed information on each of the funded programmes will be shared in the Autumn and further learning opportunities will be organised over the course of the grants. To be added to the Better Careers for Better Care mailing list, please email me – hbaine@raynefoundation.org.uk