Radical shake up of 'ineffectual' social care qualifications in Wales

There is to be a massive overhaul of qualifications for the health and social care sectors in Wales, cutting the amount of qualifications from 243 to just 20.

The number of examining boards has also been drastically reduced, with one consortium replacing 21 examining bodies in one of the biggest ever shake ups of vocational qualifications the country has ever seen, with wide reaching implications for the health and care sectors.

The reforms will come into effect from September 2019.

The changes have been introduced following a damning Government report from June last year which found that the current system to be ‘complex, confusing, patchy’ and ‘ineffective’.

Philip Blaker, chief executive at the recently founded Qualifications Wales, the new body responsible for the changes, said: “These changes are amongst the most substantial ever seen in the vocational qualifications system in Wales.

“We are addressing the issues highlighted in our review. The new qualifications will be introduced with the full support of our partners who have a wealth of knowledge about the needs of employers, and the people they provide care for.”

In addition to the structural changes, Qualifications Wales also recommended that areas of care such as dementia and domiciliary care, should be included more in the assessments of those working with older people, to plug the existing paucity of training in these areas.

It is estimated that 198,000 people work in the health and care sectors in Wales and these figures stay very constant year on year. To give some context, this figure is larger than the city of Newport, Wales’ third largest city.

Recent Government figures also show that the health and social care sectors employ more people than any other sector in Wales. The new improvements will be a welcome change to many Welsh employers in these sectors, who under the current system may not be getting staff qualified to an acceptable level.

Mr Blaker said: “The number of people employed in this sector in Wales runs into the tens of thousands. These workers care for some of the most vulnerable members of our society, and need to be properly trained and assessed”.

Qualifications Wales has announced that the examination boards chosen to deliver the new programme are City and Guilds and WJEC.

’We are pleased to award the contract and begin the development work with City & Guilds and WJEC who provided strong proposals for engaging and challenging new qualifications. I’m convinced that the future workforce in health and social care in Wales will be very well qualified,” added Mr Blaker.

Students that register for study on or after 1 September 2019 will the first to take the new qualifications, which will then be marked by the newly formed consortium.