This workshop presented the main findings from work funded by the Highland Adult Literacies Partnership in 2007/8 to develop collaborative working with the care sector and to create a sustainable approach to literacies provision for service users:
- The role of coordinator/trainer is crucial to maintain the links between the 2 sectors - Care and Learning - and should be pivotal.
- The development of work with informal/unpaid carers will reach more prospective learners and engagement should be pursued
- Links with agencies providing workplace learning provides necessary support for staff and should be part of the overall strategy
- Early involvement of literacies workers reinforces the sustainability of the approach
- Care Staff have said that a Professional Development Award/SVQ module would be useful both for personal development and to gain the appropriate skills to work with clients with literacy needs.
- Literacy staff should be trained to understand the implications of collaborative working in a similar way to the awareness raising training for Care Sector staff. This would clarify approaches and differences in Person Centred. Planning and Individual Learning Plans
The report of the project can be found on Adult Literacies Online.
Workshop PowerPoint.
The training programme continues to be delivered in the North of Scotland, and in one centre has become mandatory.
The full text of the paper supplied as background for the workshop and included in delegate packs.
The workshop discussions identified advantages of the approach, failed to identify any disadvantages, then went on to look at the challenges that need to be overcome if the approach were to be established. Advantages included encouraging the take up of professional development awards, energising and motivating staff, supporting retention and progression [for learners], encouraging debate about the purposes and value of learning and valuing staff.
The difficulties of finding time for new practices were acknowledged and a wide range of challenges discussed.
These offer a useful list of points to be considered when planning collaborative work with the care sector:
| Advantages |
|---|
- Creating an environment which encourages professional awards to be taken up
- Acknowledgement that everyone is learning - about other sectors, roles, about and from learners…
- It's energising and motivating for staff and learners - the collaboration
- Help with retention - help with progression
- Opening the agenda amongst different sectors and rethinking: "what is learning?", "what is literacy?"
- Valuing learning - everyone seeing it as important
- It challenges what "learning" is as opposed to traditional view of classrooms and "education"
- Valuing the activity of staff taking up training
|
| Challenges | Opportunities |
|---|
- Currently there can be a prescriptive time within which "activity" has to happen
- Staff not seeing the progress because it may take time or the steps may be small
- Defining literacy so that it can be universally understood
- Being clear about the carers role in the class
- Challenge the deficit model of "I'll do it for you"
- Monitoring - how to show impact when its difficult to measure, e.g. increased confidence
- Jargon - understanding the other sectors language
- Lack of choice of what to progress onto…..
- Limited choice of how to put literacy skills for people with learning difficulties
- Getting time to work together - to actually collaborate
- Seeing it as a priority for which time is to be made or set aside
- Challenge status of literacies from being seen as "desirable" to being seen as "essential". One person felt it people with learning difficulties were being discriminated by this "desirable" status
- To get policy change and get strategic buy in. Where this exists, support to implement the strategy.
- Working with different sectors and acknowledging their different constraints
- In some areas Day centres are being closed - moving to direct payments - with small teams of people - therefore not so easy to get access to managers (one woman had written to all the health and social care managers and not had a response)
- There is an expectation now that disabled people can be involved, but do people know or feel confident about how they can be involved
- Acknowledge that some staff within the care sector don't feel confident - an example was given where the support worker felt daft supporting someone to do drama - they were more comfortable leaving the room
- One person identified a "residual difficulty" - she would have liked her whole staff team to have been here today - because when she goes back she knows that people within the literacy partnership feel "they're not good at this", and that they are filling in someone's time for a few hours by working with people with learning difficulties
- Finding time for engagement
- Earmarking time for care workers to stay at a session
| A sea change - Direct payments might enable people to access the provision they need which brings a new opportunity to engage with more personal assistants and create a new way of working which has the agenda embedded. |
Participants noted the opportunity for significant change:
"Direct payments might enable people to access the provision they need which brings a new opportunity to engage with more personal assistants and create a new way of working which has the agenda embedded."
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