Learning for Adult Social Care Practice Innovations and Skills Development Erasmus Project

Project Title

Learning for Adult Social Care Practice Innovations and Skills Development

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for vocational education and training

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Health and wellbeing; Recognition (non-formal and informal learning/credits); Research and innovation

Project Summary

Learning for Adult Social Care Practice Innovations and Skills Development ( LAPIS) aims to support adult social care in developing work-based learning (WBL) and learning for leadershi innovation. The reason we are focussing on this topic is because our previous project Helpcare (www.helpcare-project.org) found important gaps in provision which this project addresses. The care sector has been hard-hit by Covid 19, the LAPIS project will help develop learning for leadership, skills and innovation to build reslilence for the future.

1) Care workers taking part in HELPCARE identified over 400 individual unmet training needs, many could be delivered through WBL (Pavlidis et al, 2020)
2) Care workers identified many opportunities for WBL which were not exploited by managers (Pavlidis et al, 2020)
3) Care managers expressed lack of confidence at developing and delivering WBL programmes (Pavlidis et al, 2020)
4) Care managers and commissioners did not have links with TVET or HE organisations to help them develop or gain recognition of WBL
5) Care workers and care managers recognised there were many opportunities for innovation in social care but lacked knowledge of how to identify innovation, where to get support with developing innovation and how to implement innovation in care settings.
6) There is no effective method for sharing innovation across the extremely fragmented EU care sector

The project team took the well-established principle that organisations where learning is embedded are better equipped to innovate (Landry, Becheikh, and Ouimet, 2008; Kerr and Lloyd, 2008; Holman, et al, 2012) and developed LAPIS in response to the problems outlined above.

Our objectives and outputs centre around improving skills for leaders in the care sector in work-based and innovation learning, building networks to support work-based learning and innovation learning in social care and developing the LAPIS app.
Thus, there are two policy-related outputs, IO1 covering barriers to innovation identification and development and implementation work-based learning in adult social care, and IO4 setting out strategies to overcome barriers to the recognition of work-based learning in adult social care. IO2, IO3, IO5, IO6 are a set of digital learning programmes based on information from IO1 and other project activities, which will provide a curriculum and guide for care managers, care company owners and care commissioners enabling them to develop and implement work-based learning, providing routes to partnerships with TVET and HEI to support the recognition of work-based learning, improve the capacity among care managers in particular to lead learning in the workplace and also enabling care managers and leaders to develop their skills in promoting, identifying and growing innovation in the sector. Our most innovative output is the LAPIS app, based on an innovation classification engine using machine learning to classify social care innovations and answer innovation-based queries from the adult social care sector. This unique output will allow crowd-sourcing of information about innovation and best practice, classified in line with the OSLO GUIDELINES FOR COLLECTING AND INTERPRETING TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION DATA, to support identification and sharing of innovations in social care.

We will work with 500 direct participants over the life of the project. This includes care workers, care managers, care commissioners (social workers, doctors, nurses) policy makers (civil servants at regional and national level, responsible for health and education) national innovation agencies and HEI/TVET providers.

Our underpinning methodology is participatory action research (PAR). This project approach is ideal for solving complex problems as it emphasizes participation and action, encouraging change through collaboration and reflection. PAR emphasizes collective inquiry and experimentation grounded in the lived experience of participants. We will use inclusive methods such as Ketso-based workshops (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5cZmKmLI2M) that overcome power differentials and value all participants equally.

The LAPIS project is innovative in proposing new tools to enable a fragmented sector to work more closely with each other on learning, and proposing new ways to build partnerships with TVET/HE providers so informal learning ( particularly important in the area of soft skills critical to social care) and formal work-based learning can be planned, implemented and recognised. The project is also innovative in recognising the barriers to innovation in the social care sector, and linking innovation to learning in the workplace. We envisage LAPIS facilitating more effective WBL, promoting innovation learning and practice in the sector and longer term evidence shows improving staff training improves retention and increases the status of care work in the general population, encouraging recruitment and supporting staff retention.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 448346 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF LANCASTER & Country: UK

Project Partners

• DRUZHESTVO ZNANIE
• UNIWERSYTET LODZKI
• APPLIED INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGIES (APINTECH) LTD
• Associazione “Submeet – incontrarsi per crescere”
• Blackburn College
• 50 + HELLAS ASTIKI ME KERDOSKOPIKIETAIRIA
• Lancaster and Morecambe College