Why the Further Education sector is so important to social care

The challenges in social care recruitment are well documented.  Rising vacancies, lack of engagement, planning and investment by successive governments, high turnover, inequalities in comparison to healthcare and soaring agency costs are just a few of the factors causing Providers and recruiters difficulties.

In addition to this the workforce is largely white, middle aged and female.

With hundreds of colleges and FE institutes offering courses in Health & Social Care, here are 5 reasons why FE has an important part to play in increasing 16-24 year olds in the social care workforce.

1. Students studying health and social care have chosen to do so! They want to work in social care.  This is an untapped future workforce, waiting to be realised.
2. Students and career services at colleges often find it difficult to get placements and meaningful part-time work. Covid certainly didn’t help but young people often don’t hear back after application or are told they need experience!
3. We need more resource now and we’ll need even more in the future. This initiative taps into a new audience who are currently under-represented in the workplace. Less than 10% of the adult social care sector are under 24, yet we have over 165,000 vacancies.
4. Agency costs are rising. With continuity of care so important; having a flexible part time work programme for students offers a real way to begin to reduce agency costs over time, and can be particularly useful during the school holidays
5. Those cared for and supported will also benefit greatly through the skills, experience and perspectives young people will bring into homes and services. ​​

We lose far too many young people to other sectors because they don’t know what exists in care.

Only by education professionals and providers working together will our future workforce understand what rewarding career opportunities exist in social care.

If you’d like to understand how you can put this into practice, join us at our campaign launch for Step Into Social Care, a campaign which designed for the sector, by the sector to open up jobs in social care to a wider audience.

At the launch event on the 16^th September, we will hear from the Institute of Student Employers about how other sectors engage successfully with early talent and what social care can do to improve the flow of talent into our homes and services.

If you’d like to find out more, please join us at the launch event  which you can find out more about and sign up for here:  https://cohesionrecruitment.com/events/introducing-step-into-social-care/