May the fourth be with you...

We know it is not quite May 4th just yet, but we are delighted to achieve Skills for Care Centre of Excellence for the fourth year in a row and I wanted to take this opportunity to thank my team for all of their hard work in making this happen.

Literally thousands of managers and future leaders have completed Lead to Succeed with us, with thousands more completing their learning and adding to their portable evidence portfolios with us every day.  But, in some respects, that is exactly the point; “learning” is something that happens every day and one of the key elements of Module 5 is “don’t miss the opportunity to collect that evidence” on a continuous basis.

So we had to practise what we preach!

Each year, the Skills for Care re-accreditation process is almost like starting afresh so, not unlike a CQC inspection, we had to be ready.  During the year, we get lots of feedback from the learners and managers we support and so we set out to find ways to capture it in order that we had what was needed for Skills for Care.  If you have completed Lead to Succeed, you will know two of the key elements in module 5 are the “One Drawer Inspection Kit” and the “Outstanding Log” (link to the original blog posts).  So, we created folders and documents to capture that evidence throughout the year and did not wait for the two weeks before re-accreditation to get ready. 

We also had to overcome the recent challenges around COVID-19 and come up with creative ways to deliver both Lead to Succeed and Well Led (link to the site pages on web version) in a virtual environment.  To begin with, we weren’t sure if this was even possible; however, with some learning, consistent effort and planning we were able to deliver both programmes virtually, with some of the good news stories that we captured becoming part of our evidence.

Going through the process of accreditation also provided some really interesting moments of reflection, reading through the feedback from the amazing organisations we support and hearing about the positive impact that the Skills for Care programmes have had on their leaders and managers reminded me of why we do what we do.

Even though the current situation is very different from only a couple of months ago, the need to capture evidence and record what we are doing and the impact of it (another theme from Lead to Succeed) has never been more important and so we will cover this in a future post.

I wanted to keep this post short because we know times are tough, but if we remember all the amazing work we do every day - we shall overcome.  Lastly if you have not seen our free courses, please visit: https://greymatterlearning.co.uk/social-care-courses/free-courses/