Skills for Care fund innovative projects to support education and employment of under-represented groups in social care

Out of the estimated 1.43 million people working in adult social care;

• 20% are from black minority ethnic (BME) background
• 18% are male
• 10% are aged 24 or younger (with an average age for all workers of 43 years)
• 22% are aged 55 or over
• 2% have declared a disability.

The latest figures suggest that the adult social care sector will need 275,000 more workers by 2025, and with an average of 90,000 people leaving the sector every day, employers are exploring new ways to widen their pool of applicants.

To meet future workforce demand, Skills for Care is supporting adult social care employers to look beyond traditional recruitment strategies and ‘look past the label’ to recruit people from traditionally under-represented groups who have the right values to work in social care.

This could include:

• military veterans
• homeless people
• ex-offenders
• care leavers
• people who experience mental ill-health
• disabled people
• people who are long termed unemployed
• minority groups where representation is low within the workforce
• recovering addicts.

They want to work with existing or new initiatives in England that support people from under-represented groups into education, training and/or employment, to run pilot projects that contextualise the support already available for social care and health roles.

They have funding available to support the projects and are inviting applications from collaborative partnership support models already in operation which could be contextualised for the social care and health sectors. Applications are also welcome from new partnership models or initiatives that can clearly demonstrate their ability to explore and deliver models within the project timescales.

Read more about the opportunity on Skills for Care’s website. To receive the full invitation to tender and specification document send an email  and specify the subject as: RFP specification request.

All tender documents must be returned to Skills for Care no later than 12 noon on Tuesday 13 June 2017.