Supporting workforce development across the homelessness sector, Steve Barkess (Partnership Manager) reports
As Partnership Manager we are frequently speaking to service providers about workforce development and how to make sure staff, not only on the frontline, but throughout the sector have the best training and support possible.
Since October 2024 I have been a member of a steering group in Herefordshire to consider and map out these very issues. Made up of local providers from both statutory and community organisations, we have been tasked with the role of mapping training needs for the sector within the county. To do this we had to consider what our base line was for training and personal development and what would be the minimum expectations of people coming into the sector and those already working in it.
Fortunately for us, and the wider sector, only one month prior to our first meeting, Homeless Link published the national skills framework. This framework not only creates a common skills language for current and prospective staff but will also help facilitate the recognition of transferable skills, knowledge and behaviours, and support career development, and demonstrate that skills can be passported between services. After introducing this to the steering group, we realised that half of the work had already been done for us. The framework allowed us to think about the training needs from a 360 perspective, not only for paid working but also volunteers, experts by experience and the numerous unpaid workers that make up so much of our voluntary, community and faith-based delivery. We quickly realised that although this first edition of the national skills framework focused on frontline workers that it had the potential to reach much further across the hierarchy of management and leadership.
So how did we use this in practice?
First, we mapped out what was already available. This allowed us to consider the variety of training and learning opportunities that were already at hand and prevented us from duplicating. Secondly, we started to look at our workforce development gaps and identify what training, both formal and informal, we needed to suggest to the wider homelessness partnership forum. We managed to get to this point by our second meeting and presented this to the partnership in January 2025.
Through our discussions however, we quickly realised that the framework did more than support us to identify what the gaps were in training. It enabled conversations to be had about what values and behaviours people working in the homelessness sector need or can develop. We could cross-reference training needs against this in a much easier and consistent way with the help of the framework.
Without realising it we were already thinking strategically about how we could move this forward in terms of the impact it would have on self-directed learning and how we could highlight areas of good practice and system change. We quickly realised that the framework could also be a tool to empower people to take ownership of their own professional development.
Ambitions to develop the workforce in Herefordshire are high for the Homelessness Partnership Forum and the subgroup which has put this into practice. We have developed a proposal for a 12-month programme for the county, each month focusing on a different learning topic for the sector. Many of which have been identified through the framework itself.
This is just one example of how the framework has supported a specific local area, but I have recently been contacted by another locality after sharing this framework with them. So, I’ll be taking what I have learnt and adapting this to meet the local need and supporting them to consider how they can work towards supporting staff and ensuring that they have the skills and training needed to support people at risk of and experiencing homelessness.
