How it began…

Oxfordshire Skills for Health grew out of the Stepping Stones programme at Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust (ORH).

Oxfordshire County Council had run workplace literacy programmes in Oxfordshire NHS organisations since the mid 1990s, including the Horton Hospital STITCH programme (Skills Training In Techniques of Communication at the Horton) in Banbury.

In March 2001, when hospital cleanliness and catering were rising up the NHS agenda, ORH’s head of Facilities (responsible for domestic services, catering and portering) asked Oxfordshire County Council to extend a small literacy programme offering communications, maths and IT training on one Trust site (the Radcliffe Infirmary) to the Trust’s other sites.

Thanks to funding from SEEDA (the South East England Development Agency), this was possible at relatively little cost to the Trust.

ORH Facilities hoped to add value to its employment offer and so support recruitment and retention, and also to address some of the interpersonal and intercultural communication issues arising from its large, multicultural workforce. Oxfordshire County Council wanted to extend workplace learning opportunities to staff who traditionally have had little access to training and development.

After research into how facilities staff at all levels experienced their workplace, what skills they brought to their jobs, and what they sort of training they would value, it was agreed in September 2001 that an initial 10 hours of communications, maths and IT skills training would be offered in paid work time to staff.

What happened then…

About 100, in-house and contracted-out, took up the offer. In January 2002, following the initial 10 hours, Stepping Stones was extended indefinitely on the basis of staff demand.

Programmes included communication skills, IT, English language, maths and NVQ support. In April, the trust’s chief executive presented a Trust certificate (‘commitment to lifelong learning’) to 107 staff at an awards luncheon.

Meanwhile, the Trust had decided to bring contracted-out facilities services back in-house at its largest site. Stepping Stones was invited to work with the new in-house management team. ‘If we don’t get the culture right, we’ll have exactly the same problems as the contractor did.’

By August 2002, at the end of Stepping Stones’ first year, over 175 staff (mostly from facilities) had participated, including operatives, supervisors and managers, and all three facilities employers (the Trust and its two contractors) were actively involved with the programme.

In addition to a range of classroom activities around generic skills development, Stepping Stones was involved in consultancy around operational systems and procedures, facilitation, mentoring and management development.

This whole-organisation approach fitted well with the larger agenda around learning emerging in the NHS nationally.

Thames Valley Strategic Health Authority identified the value of ORH-Stepping Stones and asked if the project could be further extended to embrace the Oxfordshire’s five Primary Care Trusts.

SEEDA encouraged this development and in 2003 Oxfordshire Skills for Health was created, embracing the five PCTs as well as ORH. The project has grown further since then and now includes Oxfordshire’s Mental Health Trust and its Learning Disabilities Trust.