History of e-learning in Carers UK
In recent years, the campaigning organisation Carers UK has argued that unpaid carers have a number of skills, including task- and occupation-specific knowledge, that are invisible in the economy and therefore in society in general and which, as a result, go largely unrecognised. In 1998, a first unpaid carers and employment project (Caring Options for Training and Work), was started, funded through an ESF funded project run by Devon and Surrey County Councils. As part of this project, extensive carers' surveys were carried out in project sites, which identified loss of confidence and lack of evidence of work-related skills as the first barrier to returning to training and/or employment.
The project included the design and development of courses (known as ACE clubs), which included personal development (eg confidence building, assertiveness training and stress management) as well as identifying the transferable skills gained through caring. At the time, a perception was developing that there would be value in giving unpaid carers a clear description of their occupation and providing validation of the valuable skills and knowledge they possess. This ACE club training was considered one of the project's most successful outcomes.
However, it was also recognised that while the insights they developed were important and were being shared across local carers' centres, it would be difficult to have widespread and consistent adoption unless it was developed into a formal instrument that could be provided to home carers across the country.
In 2000, Carers UK (then known as Carers National Association) was commissioned to disseminate project findings and approached City & Guilds to discuss the possibility of accrediting ACE courses. In 2001, City & Guilds and Carers UK discussed the possibility of using e-learning for targeting carers, a move that was linked to City & Guilds' new e-strategy, and to the adoption of technologies in their mainstream assessment business.
Given the highly innovative and experimental nature of the proposal, it was agreed that this would be developed as part of a wider pilot project on carers and employment. This was to become ACE National, an ESF funded project awarded in 2002 under the EQUAL programme.
Carers UK is a campaigning body and, while it does provide some training, its courses are one-day events and focus on community care law and advocacy. It is not a learning content developer and it commissions external training providers to deliver these courses (although some Carers UK staff do provide training on occasions). Carers' centres at local level are run independently, have no formal networking structures (although some cooperate) and their structure, services and funding all differ from area to area. Local carers' centres are not education and training providers - although in recent years a few pioneering centres have begun to offer some services in this area (eg Lewisham Carers has been providing ICT training to locally based carers since 2003). They had no experience of learning technologies of any kind as users or advisors in development prior to the development of Learning for Living.
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