Alpha phase for the adult social care Workforce Development Fund, for Skills for Care

We were asked to be part of a team delivering an alpha phase to explore possible improvements to the Workforce Development Fund claims process.

The Workforce Development Fund (WDF) provides a contribution towards the costs of vocational learning for employees in the adult social care sector in England. It is disbursed by Skills for Care on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care.

The discovery work had highlighted opportunities to improve the claims process, better integrate the experience with other related services, and better deliver policy intent through the design of service.

We worked alongside our partners at Torchbox and Skills for Care to deliver the alpha experiments and investigations. 

We made recommendations to progress to the next phase, and for a longer term roadmap.

One notable recommendation was to provide the claims service as part of the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS) service. 

Our prototypes had been initially agnostic about the location of the service. But our experiments revealed that a fully integrated service could have significant potential benefits to the user experience, open up opportunities for data flows between ASC-WDS and WDF, and bring efficiencies in the way the service is managed.

Following service assessment, Skills for Care have begun to act on the alpha recommendations.