How our new Care Certificate resources support care workers across different settings and specialisms

The Care Certificate is an agreed set of standards that define the knowledge, skills, and behaviours expected of specific job roles in social care. It’s standard practice for new workers in social care to complete the Care Certificate as part of their induction.

It’s important that care workers can meet the minimum standards of the Care Certificate, but sometimes putting the Care Certificate into context in and across specialised services isn’t easy.

With this in mind, Skills for Care has developed ‘Tailoring the Care Certificate’ resources to support the delivery and achievement of the Care Certificate through different service settings and specialisms, including

supporting autistic people, supporting people with a learning disability, supporting people with dementia, supporting people with mental health, providing end of life care, and lone working. The content within each resource has been designed to help facilitate understanding and contextualise learning in a range of these social care settings.

How we created our new resources

We’ve worked with sector experts who’ve provided us with insight into the content and its delivery. Something that we’re immensely proud of is that we’ve created resources which will genuinely make a difference to people going forward.

One person whom we worked closely with on the ‘Tailoring the Care Certificate for people with autism’ resource is Natasha Karena Nathan. Passionate about autism equality, diversity, and accessibility, Natasha has high-functioning autism with a sensory disorder. She was delighted to help make the Care Certificate autism-friendly.

Natasha’s experience

Like many of us, Natasha struggled to adapt to many of the life altering changes which took place in 2020. In particular, the shift from face-to-face communication to complete reliance on digital technology to keep in contact with friends, family and colleagues. Despite the challenges that Natasha faced during this time, she was determined to help other autistic people and those with learning difficulties who would benefit from extra support.

Natasha’s main goal is to make autism resources more accessible – to autistic people, healthcare professionals, retail workers and the general public. So, when she was approached by Skills for Care to work on the new Care Certificate resources, Natasha jumped at the chance and was able to use many of her own experiences to form case study’s and scenarios.

Feeling proud and fulfilled by her involvement, Natasha told us how working on the resources helped to boost her confidence, while inspiring her to undertake more projects in the future. Since then, Natasha has gone on to help with Skills for Care qualifications reviews, in addition to the work she does with Harrogate Autism Association and Opening Minds.

We asked Natasha to share some final words, highlighting her experience of working with Skills for Care to create the new resource, and to give insight into the importance of adapting content for different specialisms.

What next

Gaining feedback on the quality of the new resources was vitally important to us. We wanted to make sure that they wouldn’t just be fit for purpose, but that they would add meaningful value to the Care Certificate, and for those working in the sector.

It’s also important that the information provided in the resource is of the correct standard; supporting the learning of the individual, and making the achievement of the Care Certificate straightforward for all.

We hope the new resources will be a valuable tool, and we’ll be looking for ongoing feedback as we move forward.

Take a look at the new resources

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