The principles of leadership and management for adult social care

This introductory three-week course from The King’s Fund is for anyone working in or interested in health and social care in its broadest sense, regardless of experience or role. It’s designed to introduce you to some of the foundations of leadership, kindness, and compassion. You’ll explore why these qualities matter now more than ever, and how to develop your personal practice of kind and compassionate leadership.

We offer leadership development opportunities, resources and support for health and care staff across the South East from all backgrounds and experience levels who want to help create a more capable, compassionate and inclusive healthcare system.

We enable staff to fulfil their potential within their roles and our approach is bespoke, inclusive and collaborative. Through our bitesize learning offers, coaching and mentoring, local and national programmes we can help you develop the knowledge, skills, expertise, attitudes and behaviours to support the next steps in your personal leadership journey.

Skills for Care hosts local and national events and networks to support the adult social care sector with their workforce development needs.

Search for events in your local area by region and by topic. If you’re looking for network event in your area and can’t find it on the listing below, please contact your locality manager.

Here you can find resources which introduce fundamentals of health and care. Our first learning opportunity is RESTORE2 Training as provided by Hampshire and Isle of Wight ICB.

This course aims to provide you with the skills and knowledge to lead, organise and motivate teams. This qualification is ideal if you have management responsibilities, but no formal training, and are serious about developing your abilities. It’s particularly suited to practising team leaders seeking to move up to the next level of management, and managers who lead people through organisational change, budget cuts or other pressures.

The Lead Practitioner in Adult Care will guide and inspire team members to make positive differences in someone’s life when they are faced with physical, practical, social, emotional, psychological, or intellectual challenges. They will have achieved a level of self-development to be recognised as a lead practitioner within the care team, contributing to, promoting, and sustaining a values-based culture at an operational level.

This apprenticeship is suitable for: Adult Care Workers who work in residential or nursing homes, domiciliary care, day centres, a person’s own home, or some clinical healthcare settings

This Leadership and Management course looks at the foundational skills needed to be a successful manager and leader. It could be that you’ve suddenly found yourself in a position of responsibility, or in charge of a team or running a department, or it could be that you’re in a planned stage of your career and are ready to develop or improve your leadership skills and qualities. This course is suitable for anyone wishing to learn more tools and information to succeed in a leadership or management role.

Develop your confidence

Overcome challenges

Get insight

Get ahead

The responsibilities of leaders and managers in adult social care can not be underestimated. You need a range of skills, knowledge and qualities to be successful, and you need the ability to draw off these at different times in different situations. In this module, you’ll start to explore some of those abilities and plan your next steps to leading and managing good and outstanding adult social care services.

It’s important to continually respond to and learn from what is going well, and what isn’t going so well. This enables you to make improvements to your service and offer that benefit everyone – especially those accessing care and support.

This qualification is for first line managers seeking to broaden skills, knowledge and behaviours in a more flexible and practical way related to today’s leadership and management practices.

Managers must develop and evolve their practice to respond to the challenges they and their employees face. The Management Essentials course develops the essential management skills to align managing and leading by using a practical and effective model that everyone can understand.

The Manager Induction Standards (MIS) set out what a manager needs to know and understand to perform well in their role.

Leaders and managers are important to the success of any organisation. That’s why the effective induction of managers needs to be a key focus, so they start off on the right step and in the right direction.

Skills for Care has reviewed the Manager Induction Standards (2023) so you can use them to support this process. 

This course focuses on a range of topics, including what managers do, what skills they require, and how you can develop as a manager.

This knowledge-based qualification ensures that the learner can demonstrate understanding of the principles of leadership and management in adult care services.

Equivalent to an A-level, this is an essential course for Team Leaders and Supervisors. Each of the nine units has a knowledge element where you will learn about management models and theories, which you will then apply to your workplace for the Skills units, to create a portfolio of evidence or presentations with assignments.

The Skills for Care podcast series ‘The care exchange’ celebrates the role of managers in social care.

What is the difference between leadership and management?

Stephen Covey says: “Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.”