Learning Environments and Placements
At any time, there are approximately 14,000 students and learners across South Yorkshire within the health and care sector. Ensuring they have the best experiences possible while on a placement is key to supporting them into careers within health and care. The Safer Learning Environments Charter has been developed to provide a framework for organisations to agree to ensuring that they are safe places to learn for all, allowing people to grow and develop the knowledge skills and experiences needed in their chosen pathway. All NHS partners are in the process of implementing this charter so that every learner can expect to have a great learning experience that is supported and inclusive.
We are continuing to offer leadership placements to nursing, midwifery and AHP undergraduates within the TEEAA team, and have supported 48 between April and March, providing over 11,00 placement hours. We would also like to thank colleagues within other teams who are also supporting our learners, with students completing placements within the AHP Faculty, place teams and the ICB’s nursing team among others.
The team have also been representing the ICB and South Yorkshire in national conversations and work. We have taken part in workshops to design and develop a national benchmarking tool as part of the Educator Workforce strategy, as well as round table discussions on developing a strategy to make social care and the voluntary sector a first choice for placements for student nurses and nursing associates.
Apprenticeships and New roles
Apprenticeship Leads are supported through two system-wide partnership working groups for NHS and local authority partners, sharing best practice, networking and addressing challenges in a timely, collaborative manner. We have discovered that during 2024 the NHS partners in SY actively support more than 1200 apprentices across 85 different standards and have a retention rate in excess of 80%, which is considerably better than the national average of 63%.
Levy paying employers have gifted or transferred more than £1 million this year to small employers in general practice, social care, hospices, the charity sector and Yorkshire Ambulance Service enabling them to recruit and upskill across their professional groups. We are managing to support all the transfer requests in SY ourselves, and there is room to do even more.
Our Apprenticeship Placement Agreement is working well and we are still considered exemplar in this area nationally.
Members of our SY group have contributed to the newly approved Business Assistant Level 2 Apprenticeship which has been a challenging journey, but well worth the effort as new starts can commence in September. This has been eagerly awaited by but private and public sector employers alike, and our health and care partners anticipate picking up this standard again.
We have delivered our 3rd year of Apprenticeship Discovery Session in National Apprenticeship Week in February, attracting more than 1400 pupils in years 10 and upwards to join us for an hour of NHS apprentice journeys. Our partner employers kindly supported apprentices in Customer Services, Biomedical Science, Project Management and Occupational Therapy to share their motivations and personal stories showcasing the variety and diversity of opportunities available. Each employer also ran activities or online sessions for potential apprentices in the existing workforce as well as some external activity and social media engagement.
This year our Apprenticeship Leads have navigated changes from NHS Employers on salary for apprentices who shouldn’t be disadvantaged from developing as an apprentice, whilst waiting for long term workforce plan funding. We have mobilised an array of evidence for submission to the DoE to retain funding for Level 7 apprenticeships (ACP, solicitor, senior leader, town planner and financial accountant to name a few) so crucial to our development plans and service transformations.
Recently this focus has moved to work on Functional Skills policy changes which affect our entry and progression current and future apprentices, as well as training provider entry criteria and non-apprentice job descriptions. At the time of writing partners are working through these issues and awaiting further announcements.
SY Careers (NHS Health and Care)
SY Careers website launched in October, and to date we have attracted nearly 8,000 views and 2,420 downloads. Especially popular are the ‘Teacher Resource’ and ‘place’ pages. Home :: SYREC Health and Social Care Careers
All 4 places have an active career ambassador and work experience scheme. In addition, we offer on-line packages in Dentistry, Health and Care Pharmacy, Psychology and the Allied Health Professions, accessed through the website.
Our groundbreaking ‘Jobs for Everyone’ primary school careers package has gone National and is now hosted and promoted via the Careers and Enterprise Company Primary Futures website. We also offer the following menu of resources to teachers:
Our partnership recruitment programme with Sheffield College and Sheffield NHS and care employers is going from strength to strength.
Delivery to over 200 students has resulted in 125 expressions of interest for an entry level job with us. Interviews with employers take place in May.
The project has been nominated for an education sector award in the Innovation category.
We successfully bid £10,000 from UK Shared Prosperity Fund in Doncaster to deliver ‘Health and Care Careers in Action’. a 16+ event in March. We have commissioned an acting company, Enact, to script and deliver live workshops and create lasting content for use after the event. https://youtu.be/3anVZYAfJP4.
Employability
We continue to support the NHS Universal Families initiative and offer support to local authority colleagues to share information, ideas and collate relevant reporting data in a timely way. As T Level student numbers continue to expand, we organise a regional group to share best practice, learn and collaborate with education partners. This includes work with both clinical and IT industry placements. Whilst we don't have much data on the destinations of the first students from the Health T Level courses, we do know anecdotally that some are commencing undergraduate study in AHP roles.
Upskilling / Workforce development
Working with the Principals from our four Further Education Colleges in South Yorkshire we have agreed three strategic priorities: Digital Skills; Admin pipelines; Supporting career professionals with the skills and knowledge to represent careers and pathways in our sector.
Work has begun to align the SYICB Digital Skills strategy with potential training offers from Further Education to develop:
- new Digital Professionals roles
- digital skills and confidence for existing employees
- bolt on modules for new staff in training.
Funding options to be explored that utilise existing education budgets and employment skills budgets (via SYMCA).