Thankfully, things have changed; not only are the needs of staff and service users more valued than ever, but the 2000 Care Standards Act and Valuing People white paper now make proper staff development, and the involvement of clients in training, mandatory.
Yarrow Housing has been developing a programme with these two goals in mind for several years.
We've found that there are some key factors to getting it right.
Focus on users' needs
The staff-user relationship can often become too paternalistic, with the result that professionals can put a higher value on their own opinions than the opinions of the service users.
For training to be effective, it's important to challenge this mindset by getting staff to understand users' needs.
One good way to do this is to have open dialogue between staff and users about training priorities.
If a staff member thinks "the person I support needs me to learn about …" rather than "I want to learn about …", it makes the subsequent training much more relevant.
Make it meaningful
If users have fears about how well they will be able to communicate, their participation can become token. If the learning relationship between both parties is to be successful, the user should be involved in every stage of their staff member's learning programme. To ensure their role has an impact, there must be a commitment to training and encouraging service users to give their views in every case.
Keep it constant and diverse
Learning doesn't only happen on training courses, especially in the learning disabilities field, where staff develop equally through constant interaction with service users.
Training should reflect this, building in supervision, coaching, mentoring and individual consultations to help capture and build upon day-to-day learning.
Staff may be used to learning in different ways, and whether a staff member learns more through one-to-one training, attending college or a combination of the two, an organisation can only benefit by offering them the choice.
Qualifications and accreditation
Under the Care Standards Act, all staff new to the sector have to complete an induction and foundation programme.
The Learning Disabilities Award Framework standardises staff training by providing evidence for the assessment of NVQs and acting as a qualification in its own right. The requirement that at least half the workforce should have the appropriate NVQs by 2005 will encourage more staff to pursue professional qualifications.
The opportunity also exists for organisations to become better trainers by having their own training courses accredited to the LDAF, seeking to become recognised as a Centre of Excellence by the Learning and Skills Council and forming training partnerships with other organisations.
The latter is also a valuable way of helping attract government funding to develop staff and exchange training ideas.
Evaluation all the way
Whatever principles an organisation uses to guide its training, they will be of no value unless they make a difference to the service provided. As well as encouraging staff to evaluate their training, learning and work practices, it is essential to ask people with learning disabilities if they are receiving an improved service from trained staff. It's only if the answer is always "yes" that an organisation can say it has trained its staff properly and listened to users' needs.
Source
Housing Today
Postscript
Mark Linington is a learning and development adviser at Yarrow Housing
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