Training Our Aims For The Future

I am pleased to be able to provide you all with a brief update on some of our departmental aims for the future which link to the overall Five Rivers Strategy. We will be sharing with you our progress over the coming months and involving each region and key staff with aspects of each arena.

Five Rivers Foundation Degree

Five Rivers wishes all staff to progress to a minimum of Foundation Degree level of qualification and we are persuing options for this in 2010. This will be undertaken by all Five Rivers staff in all service sectors. There will be a minimum entry level which is likely to be set at the current NVQ Level 3 or its QCF equivalent. We are currently in the early stages of this exciting development and we look forward to keeping everyone updated as to our progress.

Qualification Routes

You will find in the second 2010 manual that the programmes and courses we provide will be linked to the inductions standards and qualification routes for all levels of staff. This will go on to outline what training is mandatory for each levels of staff working within residential services and when it needs to be renewed. These routes will be linked to job and role descriptions. We are actively in negotiations with Higher Education Institutes (HEI) in order to validate and endorse our internal training courses in order that credit points can be accumulated. Practice Development Richard Cross, Head of Practice Development, and I will be linking the two departments together over the coming year.

Our aim is to ensure that our defined practice model is supported and endorsed by the training we provide to all our services and staff. We will also be providing training courses specifically for all staff in our practice model as the year progresses. Links to Policy and Our Residential Policy and Procedures are currently under a stringent review and will be issued to all services in the spring. Once this has happened all our training will be linked to our policies ensuring the highest standard of correlation and standardization across Residential Services.

Internal Training

We have a high number of own our staff who are involved and who are keen to further their involvement in delivery of training. This will be encouraged and made more formalized later in 2010 with key individuals who have expressed their interest in being involved in developing standardized training courses and undergoing formal training qualifications in order to do so.

Our ultimate goal is to have all our training delivered internally. External Training Provision All our external training providers will be working with us in a different way this year. Essentially we will be ensuring that all provision is delivered in line with our policy and procedures so all employees will be assured of a consistent message for practice. We will require that this relationship includes a bi-annual review of said policies and clear cross referencing with other recording and reporting structures.