The National Fostering Agency (NFA) Group is the UK’s largest independent children’s services provider of foster care, special needs education and residential care. It provides education and care across 20 schools and 19 residential care homes nationally.
The challenge: Onboarding a national, and ever-growing, workforce in a timely way
Since its inception in 1995, the NFA Group has gone from strength to strength to become the organisation it is today. The majority of the current workforce were trained in a more traditional way. While there were merits to this, and bearing in mind certain elements of the training would always need to be done in this way, it was a costly process that slowed down the process of getting new staff job-ready.
The NFA Group continues to grow and acquire other organisations, many of which have an existing workforce that also needs acclimatising to the NFA Group’s ways of doing things. Again, the possibility of providing online onboarding material presented a very attractive alternative to initial training taking place in a classroom-based setting.
An eLearning solution would mean that new staff could be placed where they were very much needed in a timely way. It would also mean that learning could be tracked, which would provide the NFA Group with a proven record of learning and a commitment to their staff’s professional development from the outset.
The right support and tools
As established, certain elements of training for new employees – for instance de-escalating techniques for the classroom – will always be best suited to a face-to-face setting. Yet these are just a small proportion of the entirety of content to be covered. By offering new members of staff a blended learning option, they would benefit from having the best of both worlds, with the online modules underpinning, outlining and contextualising the training they would receive in ‘real time’.
To meet demands for localised and accessible learning across a range of devices, the NFA Group chose the flexibility of the Articulate 360 learning suite, and predominantly Storyline 360, which would enable seamless integration within their existing LMS. Branding would be fully incorporated, and this authoring tool would allow for free rein in terms of template design and interaction options.
Impactful and cost-saving
Feedback has been very positive, and the NFA Group is keen to add to their online training provision.
Employees are given ongoing access to the training modules to seek guidance or refresh on certain areas, which provides additional benefit to the workforce.
