Better Careers for Better Care Grant-Making Programme

Second Open Call Application Guidance – open call now closed

Through this open call, we will make up to six grants to partnership proposals focused on enabling and embedding cultures of trust, respect and collaboration in adult social care in order to create sustainable professional development opportunities for care workers.

Grants will range between £60,000 and £150,000.

Proposals will be delivered within a 24-month timeframe.

Here you can find the full application guidance for our open call for Expressions of Interest, covering:

• • What we have done so far
  • What we have heard
  • Funding priorities
  • Eligibility
  • Grant-making process
  • Funding relationship
  • Information webinars
  • How to submit an Expression of Interest

What we have done so far

The Rayne Foundation believes – and evidence shows[1] – that providing better career and professional development opportunities for people working in care will result in better care and support for those who need it most.  In response to the complex and systemic challenges facing the care of people in later life, the Foundation has established a strategic funding programme focused on workforce development within adult social care – Better Careers for Better Care. 

A first open call in 2024 allocated £2 million to 8 grants across England focused on transformation within adult social care, and in particular on workforce development and career progression opportunities. Six of these grants are place-based and are supporting care staff to develop their skills and leadership in areas where commissioners are actively involved in exploring how to embed and sustain change.  Two are national in scope and focus on the narrative around social care and strengthening the care worker voice. In 2025, we made two further grants, one in Scotland also focused on shifting the narrative around adult social care, and one in Wales focused on building positive provider cultures.

We have been building our role as a convener through the programme, creating space for reflection, learning and relationship-building. We have done this most actively through facilitating a Community of Practice (CoP) bringing together colleagues from our 10 grant partners to share updates, successes and challenges.  Read more about the programme and individual grants through our First Year Learning Report.

What we have heard

Being alongside grant partners as their programmes of work have rolled out has taught us a huge amount. Grant partners have highlighted the value of independent and flexible funding which allows colleagues to pivot as they learn and respond to evolving landscapes at the local, regional, and national levels. Through these relationships and those we hold with stakeholders across the sector, we are acutely aware of the level of change and uncertainty that comes with potential policy, funding and welfare reform: this presents both challenges and opportunities for organisations that commission and provide social care, and has a significant impact on care workers and people who draw on care and support and their families.

Through our discussions, the following issues have been raised repeatedly:

• Complexity and variety of commissioning and procurement arrangements, provision, and the number of stakeholders involved.
• Hierarchical, transactional, and/or competitive relationships within and between organisations and/or parts of the system.
• Current opportunities and challenges to influence national policy and reform.

However, we also know that many organisations and local care systems are pioneering initiatives in partnership-working to support the care workforce and enable better, more joined-up care. The 2026 report from My Home Life England, How better partnership working with care providers leads to improved outcomes in adult social care, draws on a two‑year inquiry and brings together insights from 90 stakeholders, 11 case studies, and learning from My Home Life England’s work with more than 2,600 care leaders. The evidence concludes that, where care providers are engaged as equal partners in the wider system, outcomes improve for everyone.

Funding Priorities

In response, we launched a further open call with an increased focus on the cultures of trust, respect and collaboration that enable and embed career development opportunities for care workers.

We will make up to six grants to partnership proposals focused on enabling and embedding cultures of trust, respect and collaboration in adult social care in order to create sustainable professional development opportunities for care workers.

Grants will range between £60,000 and £150,000.

Proposals will be delivered within a 24-month timeframe.

Our starting point and driving reason for focusing on adult social care is improving care and support for people in later life, and so while proposals may not be specific to later life care, they must encompass care and support for older people.  The funding opportunity is open to organisations working in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

We have created a list of key terminology to support shared understanding. Click here to access the list.

When submitting an EOI, applicants need to make clear how their work will build a culture of trust, respect and collaboration in adult social care, and specifically, how they 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 such as commissioning, procurement, providers, professional care workers, people drawing on care and support, and unpaid carers.
• Bring professionals with different remits and priorities together to agree shared objectives and actions.
• Evidence the impact of collaborative cultures using key measurement indicators such as staff retention and turnover, progression rates, provider-commissioner relationships, shared governance in commissioning, improved contract sustainability, and changes made due to care worker insight and influence.

We will use the following criteria to assess applications:

• Potential for wider application and influence – in all the work we fund, we look for organisations and projects that are doing things differently from which others can learn and that have lessons beyond the local. Applicant organisations will be working to influence policy and commissioning or have clear plans to do so. We recognise that there are different routes to influence and welcome applications from smaller organisations working at a more local level to build collaborative cultures.
• Partnership – partnership working is embedded in the design and delivery of the work, bringing together organisations from different parts of the social care sector with varied perspectives, experiences and skillsets, including organisations from the voluntary, community, and social enterprise sector such as older and disabled people’s organisations. For contractual and payment purposes, we will ask one organisation to act as the lead applicant.
• Deliverable – the proposed work sits within a broader change and transformation agenda focused on the social care workforce and will have already developed a clear approach to planning, resource and delivery. Funding from the Foundation will enhance and amplify existing work and the project will be delivered within a 24-month timeframe.
• Sustainable – applicant organisations will commit to investing their own time and resources, alongside any grant from Rayne, and will be able to demonstrate their thinking about how new and successful ways of working can be embedded and resourced beyond the grant period.
• Co-production – solutions to challenges facing care workers in their professional development are co-produced with care workers and people who draw on care and support, who are paid for their involvement. Co-production opportunities are accessible with the necessary training, peer support and supervision to ensure meaningful participation.
• Equity, diversity and inclusion – applicant organisations understand and value the diversity of the care workforce, as well as people drawing on care and support, and build equity and inclusion as central tenets in their approaches to workforce development and career progression plans. Proposals take a strengths-based approach, pay attention to the barriers to recruitment and progression for certain groups and articulate how opportunities will be accessible.

While we asked applicants to identify the specific outputs and outcomes they are seeking to achieve through their work, we will work with Bean Research and shortlisted organisations to locate the work within our existing impact framework:

Eligibility

Through the open call, we want to fund outcome-specific solutions to entrenched, systemic issues facing care workers and workforce development in adult social care. We want to find organisations and partnerships with the capability and networks required to test these solutions and share the learning. We do not have a preference about who does the work. We are open to receiving Expressions of Interest (EOIs) from voluntary, statutory, and for-profit organisations.

Statutory organisations need to consider how a grant from us will enable transformation over and above delivering statutory obligations. For-profit organisations will need to show that charitable funding is necessary to enable transformative change. We expect statutory and for-profit organisations that receive our funding to commit match-funding from their own resources, indicating their commitment to the work, and to work collaboratively with the voluntary sector.

We will not fund business-as-usual training that maintains compliance and professional standards or capital projects.

Grant-making process

The grant-making process has been designed using the Foundation’s working values as a framework, and aims to be trusting, collaborative, creative and rigorous. In recognition of the time and energy it takes to apply for funding, we asked applicants to submit an Expression of Interest in the first instance.

An assessment panel is supporting the grant-making process. The panel includes external advisors who bring lived and learned experience of the social care sector, and professional expertise. Where there is any conflict of interest with a member of the assessment panel, that individual will not score or contribute to a discussion of the EOI.

The staff team will initially score and longlist the EOIs. The assessment panel will review the longlist of EOIs and agree a shortlist to be developed into full applications. Shortlisted applicants will then develop full applications alongside the Foundation staff team to be taken to the trustee board for approval.

The grant-making process will be made up of the following steps:

Once the grants have been awarded, the programme development lead will work with funded organisations to develop a Memorandum of Understanding that will include a payment and reporting schedule.

Due to limited capacity of our small staff team, we will not be able to provide individual feedback on EOIs that are not longlisted. For EOIs that are longlisted and asked to interview, but are not successful in being shortlisted, individual feedback will be given.

We are committed to continuous improvement of our application processes and grant partner relationship management. We will be contacting all our applicants after the funding decisions have been made, to conduct an independent Perception Survey, to hear your opinions, experiences and anonymous feedback about the application process.

We are a member of the IVAR Open and Trusting Funders initiative and publish our grants data on 360Giving.

Information Webinars

​We held hold two information webinars. You can watch the recordings at the following links:

• Information Webinar 1 – Wednesday 18 March 
• Information Webinar 2 – Monday 23 March

These sessions included an overview of the Better Careers for Better Care funding and criteria, and questions from participants on the funding and the application process.

How to submit an Expression of Interest

The open call for Expressions of Interest has now closed. Please do not submit an application against the above criteria through the open grants programme.

To learn more about applying for funding through our open grants programme, visit the Application Guidance webpage.

[1] Skills for Care Rapid Evidence Assessment: adult social care and factors associated with productivity and work performance, published 2017;  Towers A, Smith N, Allan S, Vadean F, Collins G, Rand S, et al. Care home residents’ quality of life and its association with CQC ratings and workforce issues: the MiCareHQ mixed-methods study. Health Serv Deliv Res 2021;9(19)