E-Readiness in the Social Care Sector: Building the capacity for e-learning

Published: December 2006

The Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) commissioned Ipsos MORI to carry out a research programme with the following objectives:

• To establish whether the social care sector in England is ready to maximise the use of e-learning in terms of technical and organisational infrastructure and in terms of the availability of e-learning content for social care
• To provide an assessment of the current capacity of the social care sector as a whole to use and produce e-learning, in particular in internet-based learning, and to exploit its full potential in pursuit of improved services for users and carers

SCIE defines e-learning as “the use of information and communication technologies to provide, support or enhance learning”.

To achieve these ends, Ipsos MORI carried out four main strands of a complex research programme:

• A review of the literature surrounding e-readiness and e-learning in the social care sector;
• A survey of 516 social care sector employers (mostly managers, with three in five operating in the private sector, a quarter in the voluntary sector and one in seven from local authorities);
• A survey of 994 social care sector staff (largely women with two in five being frontline workers); and
• A series of four case study focus groups among social care staff to assess the practical enablers of and barriers to e-learning.

• E-Readiness in the Social Care Sector: Building the capacity for e-learning (363kb PDF file)
• Summary of E-Readiness in the Social Care Sector: Building the capacity for e-learning (273kb PDF file)