Building the Social Care Workforce: An Interview with Oonagh Smyth

Your background spans human rights law, equality and strategy – how did that path lead
you into the adult social care sector? 

Oonagh: Yes it’s not the normal route I guess! There are both macro and very personal reasons why I have ended up where I have.

At the macro level, I grew up in Belfast during the height of “The Troubles” to a single mother who had four children and inequality was everywhere. There was inequality in employment, more than half of the people in the estate I grew up in were unemployed. There was also inequality in housing and public services. I became aware of this very early on. I started to volunteer for community groups working with young people in my estate and for organisations like the Northern Ireland Council on Ethnic Minorities.

At the same time, at a more personal level my mother had had a daughter with spina bifida, my eldest sister Rita. She died soon after she was born. My mother was told at the hospital not to name the baby, to forget about her and move on to have other children. My mum did name her and she was a member of our family, spoken about often, her birthday celebrated on 21 June each year. Because of this, we were always aware of people around us who were disabled and during my A Levels I volunteered for a community group that supported people with learning disabilities.

The combination of these things led me to start working with charities, on governance and policy (my legal background was helpful here) and strategy. This led me to working on equality policy in the Northern Ireland Equality Commission and working with charity governance and strategy in the National Council for Voluntary Organisations when I moved to London. I combined all of these in my role in Mencap where I led, among other things, governance, strategy and policy. And my role in Mencap, which is also a large provider of social care services, led me to my role in Skills for Care.

I have always been driven by making a difference to society, doing my small bit to try to make things better. And I see being in the social care workforce, which supports so many people every day, as a way to do that.

What have you learned from your time leading Skills for Care, and how has it shaped your approach to workforce development?

Oonagh: When I was working in Mencap I met people from the social care workforce who blew me away. They were committed, warm, professional, pragmatic and skilled. Every day I have worked in Skills for Care I continue to be blown away by people who are in the social care workforce. So that wasn’t a surprise to me but I had no idea about the scale of the social care workforce (1.6 million people) and the fact that we are going to need so many more people working in social care in the future.

I also didn’t know the scale and quality of the dataset that Skills for Care holds which covers more than half the workforce. I found out about that when I was prepping for interview and now, I talk about all the time!

The development of the Adult Social Care Workforce Strategy recognised and builds on all of these things. It starts by recognising the amazing work people do and the need to develop, reward and value them so that we can keep the people we have and attract more people to meet growing needs. It uses the Adult Social Care Workforce Dataset to show where we are now with the workforce and what needs to change. And it provides a vision for the future of the workforce which we all need to build on.

For those who might be less familiar – what is the Workforce Strategy, and why is it such a vital part of shaping the future of care?

Oonagh: The Social Care Workforce Strategy is a plan to make sure we have enough people, with the right skills and values, working in social care so we can deliver the best possible care and support to the people who draw on it.

That’s going to be quite a challenge, as we may need up to 540,000 new posts by 2040 if we’re going to keep up with the growth in the population aged over 65 alone. And that’s before we consider the 131,000 vacancies a day that we already have – or how the people drawing on care and support will have increasingly complex needs. So we need a plan.

There are recommendations for attracting and keeping the people we need, how best to train them – and also how we can bring about a wider transformation of the workforce. About half of these need some form of action by the Government – but the rest are either recommendations for other organisations or commitments from organisations like Skills for Care that are already in a position to make change happen.

We worked with the whole of the adult social care sector to develop the Workforce Strategy – and we also worked with colleagues from health and education. The collaboration between so many different people and organisations was truly remarkable. I’ve never seen the sector come together quite like this in all the time I’ve been working in social care.

The end result is a Strategy that gives us a really clear sense of what we need to do build the adult social care workforce we’re going to need. And the whole of the sector is behind it.

As we approach the one-year milestone, what progress will you be reflecting on in your session?

Oonagh: I’m really pleased with how much has happened in less than a year. There’s so much I could talk about, but here are just a few examples.

Some of the most significant recommendations for government are in progress. For example, the work towards a Fair Pay Agreement supports the recommendation in the Strategy on improving pay, terms and conditions for care workers. The Government is also continuing to support things like the Care Workforce Pathway, Care Certificate and training to help care workers deliver delegated healthcare activities. All of those are in the Strategy.

Lots of organisations outside government are implementing elements of the Strategy too. For example, the National Care Forum is working on a pilot for a new ‘Care Technologist’ role, which will be really important in bringing about technological innovation in social care. The Care Quality Commission is signposting to good examples of learning and development for care workers. And the things we’re doing ourselves at Skills for Care include new research to help us see whether it would be beneficial to have a professional register for care workers.

There have been some nice surprises too. For example, the Social Care Workforce Strategy recommends that there should be a People Promise for the people working in social care, like the one that already exists for NHS staff. While we don’t have that yet, we’ve found that some Integrated Care Systems have acted on that recommendation by rolling out the NHS People Promise itself to the social care workforce, which isn’t what we expected but great to see.

Without giving too much away – what can people expect to hear about what’s next for the strategy and for workforce development more broadly?

Oonagh: I can tell you that we’re currently in the process of reviewing the Strategy. Most of the work on it happened before last year’s general election – so, among other things, we want to make sure it reflects any changes to social care policy under the Labour Government. We’re not expecting to make any major changes to the recommendations or commitments, but we do want to make sure that everything in the Strategy still makes sense.

Many of the recommendations and commitments in the Strategy are already in progress, so that work will continue – and then there’s the work that’s yet to start, so we’ll be working hard over the coming months and years to get those recommendations adopted by the people who are responsible for bringing about those changes.

There are some really good opportunities to make the case for that, not least the new commission on social care that’s being led by Baroness Casey. I’ve already had a positive first meeting with the committee staff and I’m looking forward to sharing more about the Workforce Strategy with them.

To join Oonagh’s session, book your place at Care Innovation Summit today.