York & North Yorkshire Local Skills Improvement Fund Research for Health & Social Care and Digital Skills

For the past 8 months, Yorkshire Learning Providers (@WYLPLTD) have been a delivery partner for the York & North Yorkshire Local Skills Improvement Fund and have acted as the partnerships research partner. We have been working on two specific pieces of research that support the LSIF activity, one on Digital Skills and one on Health & Social Care. Today we officially launch our research into these areas.

Our aim is to support curriculum development to help align employer needs to the education offer across the region. We have held a series of forums bringing employers, stakeholders, and education professionals together to discuss key skills themes. We have conducted a range of interviews, employer & college visits, many hours of desk-based research and collated findings from all activities to bring together a report full of insight into need and opportunity.

Our Health & Social Care research commenced as part of the mobilisation phase of LSIF to really understand what the needs were, and we used stage 2 of the research to further explore curriculum areas and more localised responses. The research was managed by Kelly Townend, Quality & Contract Manager at YLP:

“Through working on the LSIF, employers have keenly engaged with us and have proactively shared insights into need and curriculum briefs, which shows a real want to work in partnership with education and skills provision to address their skills gaps and improve recruitment and retention for the sector. The key areas which have recurringly arisen is the need for more community-based learning for residents, greater need for shorter programmes and ESOL, as well as better understanding the specific challenges the sector faces and how these can be addressed in education and curriculum design. Whilst employers recognise the education offer cannot be completely tailored, they do share that more alignment to local & regional illnesses, patterns and trends and challenges needs to have a clearer response. As a sector in crisis now is the time to work collaboratively to address the current skills needs of the sector to ensure that not only, we have the volumes of professionals to care for residents but that the workforce has the right skills to deliver the best care for residents both now and in the future. I really hope our reports will aid this important agenda”.

We will continue to work with the LSIF partnership and the local employers and forums to continue the conversation and ensure skills development and curriculum insight is never off the table!

Thank you to my team, who worked extremely hard in the research and reporting phases of the project, thank you to all the employers, stakeholders, providers, and partners we worked with to gather the information and insight, and thank you to two research partners, Lightcast and FE Tech, who worked with us on some of the content in the reports.

We hope you find the reports useful, and we look forward to showcasing some of the key points at our dissemination event on 10th May.

We will also be sharing our work on the digital advancements and tech development at our ‘Future of Learning – AI & Digital’ summit in June, funded through the LSIP- which will kick-off a series of ‘The future of…’ events highlighting & showcasing the digital developments. YLP Member only event (07.06)