Ageless at Work - Skills for Care

tool box that was developed as part of the European Commission funded Fair Play for Older Workers
project. The DWP European Social Fund division has also published a good practice guide on
developing age-related programmes (ECOTEC, undated). While the primary audience is co-financing
organisations, it contains useful information on providing learning and mentoring opportunities for
older people. Skills for Care South West’s “The Value of Learning: Creating a Learning
Organisation” (Skills for Care South West, 2009) also provides managers and care home owners
with information about sources of funding and hints and tips about how to persuade reluctant learners
to ‘give it a go’. This includes providing one-to-one support, sensitively delivered NVQs (see Tick
Tock), making learning fun and informal methods.
Widening knowledge about the range of learning opportunities available amongst managers can also
increase take-up of training among other staff. For example, the Bournemouth, Dorset and Poole
Learning Hubs Project (Howe, 2009) found that bringing third sector social care organisations
together and supporting them by facilitating meetings and producing newsletters and fact sheets had
raised awareness of funding for learning and of learning opportunities leading to greater participation
in training:
“By providing [knowledge about funding and learning opportunities] the Learning Hub has
enabled the social care agencies to develop their own learning culture, and thereby have a
positive impact on the development of staff skills and the quality of service provision.”
Bournemouth, Dorset and Poole Learning Hubs Evaluation, 2009
It is not clear however whether this resulted in increased learning opportunities for older people
specifically.
A wide range of approaches therefore have been used previously to promote age positive practice in
training and development, some of which have focused specifically on skills development issues and
some have encompassed this within approaches that advocated sound age positive employment
practice more generally. This suggests a fairly broad field of potential activity for the project that could
include work with skills intermediaries (such as that approach tested by the Broker-Age project) to
ensure the needs of older learners are brought into discussions between managers and skills brokers,
the use of action learning sets for line managers to support them to adopt age positive practice and
prevent them unwittingly (or deliberately) sidelining the skills development needs of older people. This
could incorporate wider dissemination of Skills for Care South West’s The Value of Learning: Creating
a Learning Organisation report. Finally, the project could support the development and/or wider
adoption of learning hubs as a way of raising awareness of learning opportunities.
Activities that challenge older workers’ perceptions of their ability to learn, and need
for learning
The research has identified a wide range of intrinsic factors (i.e. related to the individual’s attitudes,
beliefs, knowledge and motivation) that feed into individuals’ behaviour and decision making around
learning and training (UKES, 2009). For older workers in particular, this can include beliefs about
being ‘too old’ to train, problems with basic skills and a fear of ‘going back to the classroom’. Older
people by virtue of their (usually) longer tenure in their current job may also feel that they do not need
to train, or feel that requesting training implies some deficiency in their skills. Over half (53%) of
Ageless at Work: Change workplace cultures, development skills. Good practice report 37