DH releases £4m Care Act training fund amid concerns over workforce readiness

The Department of Health has released £4m in extra funding for councils to train up their staff for implementation of the Care Act and address other regional issues ahead of the legislation’s introduction next April.

The DH grant will be allocated to the ‘lead’ local authority in each of England’s nine regions (see table below). Each region will receive a flat sum of £200,000 topped up with an additional sum based on the number of councils and the size of the social care workforce in the region.

The funding injection comes on top of the £125,000 each local authority has received under the government’s Care Act implementation grant.

In a letter to directors announcing the changes, Association of Directors of Adult Social Services president David Pearson said that the government had agreed to additional funding after a stocktake of local authority readiness for the act had highlighted “a number of implementation challenges”. These included question marks over councils’ in-house and external expertise to deliver training on the act “at the pace and scale required”; difficulties assessing the numbers of self funders and demand for carers assessments under the act; and a “lack of awareness” of the act by NHS colleagues that had made it harder to implement the reforms, the Better Care Fund and wider health and care integration projects.

Pearson’s letter outlined two priorities for spending the money: “Firstly, training for staff to support implementation with a presumption that this is based on the delivery of the Learning and Development modules developed by Skills for Care, available in October…[and] secondly other support needs for councils in the region, collectively or individually, building on learning from the recent stocktake of progress.”

How the funding breaks down by region

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