Casey’s call to action – how building a learning culture could help

Baroness Casey’s recent letter to the Secretary of State for health and social care sets out three priority areas where the impact of system failure is felt most acutely. She highlights inconsistent thresholds, practice and escalation across local areas with regard to safeguarding, a system that frames dementia as an inevitable consequence of ageing rather than a treatable neurological condition and slow fragmented systems designed for fluctuating long term needs creating unacceptable delays for people with the most severe, fast-progressing, predictive conditions.

Casey is clear that these failures are failures of the system – and in particular, highlights the fragmentation across health and social care.

All of these changes will have implications for the people working within care and health services.  What new knowledge and understanding will they need to acquire?  How are we asking people to think about things differently?  What new skills might they need?  What is their contribution to delivering joined up, holistic health and care?  How do they work well with colleagues in other parts of the system?

The default tends to be “we need some training” and that might be true.  But it’s not the whole answer.  Only 20% of what we learn is through formal training so how do systems become more intentional in influencing the other 80% of learning that we do at work?  Developing learning eco-systems that enable people to learn as part of everyday work, to learn with people outside of their immediate team and to have time and space for reflection and feedback about how they might put new learning into practice can be transformational in equipping our workforces to feel enabled and empowered to deliver change.  Not only that, but the act of learning together builds trust and relationships.  If we are serious about delivering human-centred change, it’s these relationships, that cut across team, service and organisational boundaries, and that enable staff to coalesce around the needs of people who need care and support, that will deliver change on the ground.

Making learning part of what we do at work everyday brings multiple benefits:

·      It doesn’t require a training budget

·      It doesn’t require extended periods away from the workplace

·      People tend to be more receptive to learning when it feels a natural part of what they do

·      It gives people more agency in their own learning

·      It values and recognises the strengths, knowledge, skills and experience of team members

·      It enables learning to evolve and build

Developing a learning culture or eco-system is easier than we might imagine.  Whilst requiring senior level support and sponsorship, the practicalities can be developed much more locally through the co-operation of middle managers.  Middle managers are critically important as agents of change (and often aren’t recognised or enabled as such – more on this in a future blog!) and big organisations and systems can sometimes overlook their ability to influence and lead learning environments.  There’s not a one-size fits all off the shelf design because what works will be different depending on local circumstances and context.  To ground what a learning culture looks like in practice, it could include:

·      An hour a week for joint reflection and discussion – what does this change mean for how we work?  What could/should we try?  What did we learn?

·      Experts in practice being identified from within our workforces and enabled to share their knowledge with peers .  We have to get better at identifying and amplifying the knowledge, skills and learning of staff who have developed in-depth knowledge and are excellent practitioners.

·      Action learning or communities of practice that enable peer reflection and learning about real work challenges

·      Opportunities to observe others in action – this could be anything from spending a couple of hours in another team to shadowing or secondments

·      Coaching from managers.  The organisations with the most engaged workforces in the world invest in developing managers as coaches because they recognise the profound impact it has

·      Access to mentoring or buddying up where one person gets to work alongside another more experienced and knowledgeable with the opportunity to ask questions and seek feedback

·      Self-directed learning through webinars, podcasts, reading

I could go on but hopefully this helps bring the concept to life.  It’s not rocket science, it’s about a different mindset to learning and building new habits that will undoubtedly raise engagement, skills and confidence of our workforces.

I think we so often default to training because it’s easy to see, to quantify, to reassure.  Demonstrating the impact of learning eco-systems requires a little more thought but it’s entirely do-able – from learning logs for individuals to impact frameworks that capture anticipated and actual impact at organisation or system level.

With regard to Baronness Casey’s letter we have a choice – we can wait and see what evolves nationally or we can step up locally and be proactive in getting ahead of what will inevitably need to change.  Learning cultures enable meaningful learning that builds and evolves over time and practically translates in how we work.  I believe they are an essential part of the solution.