Speaking at Unison’s 2025 National Health Care Conference in April, the Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting MP announced ‘£12 million to fund courses and qualifications for carers to develop new skills, build expertise and advance in their careers’.
The accompanying press release tied these skills to technology, stating ‘Care leaders will be trained to use the latest technology to improve patient care, free up staff time and help people live independently in their own homes for longer’ (emphasis added). The press release also elaborated that the £12 million for 2025-2026 would be added to the existing ‘Adult Social Care Learning and Development Support Scheme’, launched in September 2024. The support scheme enables eligible adult social care employers in England to claim staff training costs. To be eligible, organisations must provide an adult social care service, directly employ care staff in England and have an up-to-date account on the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS), and staff must be ‘non-regulated’ and have a UK National Insurance number. While Wes Streeting’s announcement broadly referred to providing ‘care workers the opportunities to progress in their career’ the subsequent press release was more specific, narrowing the focus to digital technologies, and ‘care leaders’, as opposed to the wider care workforce. As a reflection, a dedicated digital technology training course is included in the ‘eligible training courses and programmes’, but it is limited to those in leadership roles. The ‘Level 5 Digital Leadership Award ’ aims to ensure adult social care leaders and managers have the skills they need to lead the care workforce in adopting digital innovations and new technology to help transform the sector. This qualification is therefore focused on developing members of the care workforce of a certain level of seniority, including registered managers within care providers; senior social care practitioners such as team leaders, deputy and assistant managers. The ‘eligible training courses and programmes’ has no similar course for more junior colleagues, focused solely on digital skills and competence.
Given the policy onus on integrating digital technologies into care provision, this approach to developing training and qualifications for ‘care leaders’ is unsurprising and could support the aims of policy in ways that deliver positive outcomes. However, there is no mention of additional resources for care workers in more junior roles; their skills, and how they might be developed, are overlooked. This is in tension with the common portrayal of care workers as a group who are lacking in digital skills – and skills more broadly. Digital skills may be part of the general training opportunities available to care workers who are not in senior roles, but while there are additional opportunities to learn about supporting people with specific conditions, there are no dedicated resources for this part of the workforce to enhance their expertise with technologies in the Adult Social Care Learning and Development Support Scheme.
The digital skills ‘deficit’
In a collaborative project between the Digital Care and Innovation theme and Care Workforce Change group of the ESRC-funded Centre for Care, we have been looking at what digital skills are already present across different levels of the care workforce, and what skills might need to be developed. In a recent paper in Frontiers in Sociology, we explored these issues using in-depth case study data from seven care providers across England, including interviews with care managers; care leaders and deputy managers; care workers and office and hospitality staff. We found that a range of different digital devices and systems were in use, such as ‘care management systems’ to organise and record care; digital log in devices; sensors; call-bell systems linked to smartphones, and mainstream devices like smart speakers. We also heard about technologies not in use, which had been abandoned or withdrawn for reasons typically related to their functionality or usability.
Our interviews highlighted that despite the policy discourse on the digital skills ‘deficit’ in the care workforce, the devices and systems being integrated into care work did not require new or significantly enhanced skills related to technology. One manager explained:
How bizarre that in our world that we live in that our 100 carers with poor academic background, the cost-of-living crisis and all the crap that’s going on in their life, not being IT savvy. Now all of a sudden, they’re on their phones working a digital app, taking photos of medication, sending them across and to think we’ve got all this brilliant stuff. And then our very well-trained academic people that come in to inspect or audit and evaluate, struggle immensely with it.
Some staff members were initially reluctant or sceptical about the integration of digital devices into care work, but they adapted and learnt to use the technologies they needed during their shifts. We also found that the design of the technology itself can limit its adoption. This means that care workers and those in leadership roles spend a lot of time troubleshooting and finding workarounds to problems created by the technology, demonstrating a different conception of digital skills that hinged on creativity and resilience. Systems of peer support and ‘champions’ were used to support skills development, where the staff with the most digital confidence became the formal or informal ‘go to’ source of information. The development of networks of support was, however, impeded by issues of workforce retention that are rife throughout the sector, connected to low pay and poor terms and conditions of employment. As a consequence of staff shortages, skill development could inadvertently intensify and increase the number of tasks that staff were already responsible for; and the high turnover of staff meant that skill development was an ongoing process rather than a one-off fix in the case study providers.
Our interviews also highlighted that the diversity in the types of digital technologies in varied care settings make initiatives like generic digital skills frameworks potentially difficult to implement. In a fragmented sector, there will always be obstacles when enacting any kind of standardised training and qualifications unless there is a statutory requirement to do so. Without that, digital skills remain an ‘add on’. Discussions about digital skills cannot ignore this context of fragmentation, connected to marketisation in England and globally.
To return to Wes Streeting’s speech at Unison’s 2025 National Health Care Conference, initiatives like the Adult Social Care Learning and Development Support Scheme sit within wider policy assumptions about a digital skills gap; our research questions the extent to which this gap exists in practice. The scheme also contains its own assumptions that the upskilling of senior staff will produce the desired result of greater digital technological adoption and integration throughout the care sector – at the case studies we focussed on, staff across the whole workforce were actively adapting to digital technologies, in ways that were extending and building upon their ‘non-digital’ (and still typically overlooked) skills. In his speech, Streeting also cited the aspirations of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer that his sister, who is a care worker, is to command the same respect as he does in his role. Recognising and rewarding the existing digital creativity and skills across the care workforce, developed in an understaffed and overworked context, would be an important first step.
About the authors
Kate Hamblin is Professor of Social Policy and Director of the Centre for Care. She joined the University of Sheffield in 2018 to work on the Sustainable Care programme. She also currently leads the Centre for Care’s Digital Care research theme and is the UK Networks and geographical lead for the North and East-Midlands in the IMProving Adult Care Together (IMPACT) evidence implementation Centre. She is also the Policy and Practice Liaison lead for the NIHR School for Social Care Research at the University of Sheffield.
Grace joined the Centre for Care in April 2022 as a Research Associate working on Digital Care with Professor Kate Hamblin. Her current research explores digital inequalities, sectoral fragmentation and technology implementation, and care labour and working conditions. Grace is also a researcher on a project investigating AI-driven technology and platform work in homecare in the UK, Finland and Sweden, as part of the Joint Programming Initiative ‘More Years, Better Lives’.
Diane Burns
Co-investigator, University of Sheffield
Diane joined Sheffield University Management School in October 2012 as a Lecturer in Human Resource Management and Organisational Behaviour. Prior to this, she was Research Fellow at the School of Allied Health Professions, University of East Anglia.
Diane’s research focuses on the organisation and management of social care particularly how structures, processes and dynamics produce and affect care provision and the lives of people who work within or need the support of social care. She has published in a range of management & organisation journals examining temporality, digitalisation, corporate colonisation and instability in social care organising.
Erika is interested in various aspects of work and care. As part of the research group that focuses on the changing social care workforce in the UK, she is involved in projects exploring how national policy reforms affect the care workforce and the digital skills of care workers.
Prior to joining the Centre for Care, Erika conducted research on topics ranging from the impact of work-care reconciliation policies on women’s labour force participation to digital skills. Her main research interest is focused on how gender inequalities are created and recreated at the intersection of work and care and how women’s working lives are shaped by different institutions, such as the labour market, work organisations and the family.
