Situation
Aspens Charities provides high-quality care and support to people on the autism spectrum and with learning disabilities, as well as their families and support networks. Working across the South East, Aspens supports children, adults and families. It offers specialist services designed to increase knowledge and understanding, challenge societal perceptions and encourage acceptance in society.
As a charity committed to supporting both adult’s social care and children’s services, Aspens prioritises comprehensive staff training. Every team member completes mandatory and additional, condition-specific training, tailored to the needs of their service.
Challenge
The charity faced multiple challenges with their previous eLearning provider, which lacked the adaptability needed for their diverse teams. The platform’s training delivery, consisting mostly of spoken presentations with slides, didn’t engage staff, and its complex navigation caused frustration. Managing the system was time-consuming, inefficient and costly, with a pricing structure that increased overall expenses.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for a more flexible and engaging training solution. After researching alternatives, Aspens found that Flourish (formally known as Grey Matter Learning) and their ‘Click’ eLearning platform, was the perfect fit.
Solution
Aspens needed a training platform which could offer an individualised, user-friendly experience for both staff and management. Click Learning stood out, with its clear progress tracking to support compliance, its cost-efficiency, ensuring they could offer high-quality training sustainably, and the platform’s interactive and stimulating content, keeping staff engaged and motivated. The leadership-focused courses have been especially valuable for Aspens ’s senior teams.
Together, these factors made Click Learning the ideal eLearning choice as Aspens shifted to prioritising online learning.
Implementation and Support
Aspens partnered with Flourish to engage Click Learning in 2021. The charity was attracted to working with Flourish because they were able to offer the kind of tailored support they needed – and they weren’t disappointed.
Tracy Wilkins, Learning and Development Manager at Aspens Charities commented on Click Learning’s comprehensive support, including set-up and training, saying:
“Peter Humphreys from Click Learning provided outstanding support from the start.”
The Aspens Charities team was equally impressed with Click Learning’s collaborative approach and overall customer service. Tracy commented:
“The customer service provided by Click Learning is the best I have come across in my 14 years of working in Learning and Development. Their responsiveness and dedication to our needs have been exemplary”, adding “they resolve issues incredibly quickly.”
Results
Technical set-up
Aspens quickly discovered the benefits of the Click Learning platform’s technical set up. The Recite Me tool, which translates the courses into over 100 languages and offers a wide range of accessibility tools, has made training much more inclusive, especially for neurodivergent learners. The easy-to-use Click Learning mobile app allows staff to fit training into their busy days more easily.
Furthermore, Click’s efficient learning management system (LMS) seamlessly integrates with Aspens ’s HR system, streamlining processes by simplifying the management of training data. The platform’s ability to prepopulate a list of mandatory training when enrolling new staff has been a significant time-saver.
Aspens also commented on their improved ability to track and evidence compliance. Click Learning’s RAG-rated manager matrix allows the monitoring of staff progress at a glance, ensuring training is up to date. The charity is currently changing their reporting on service KPIs. Click’s enhanced reporting has supported the charity’s transition phase, offering valuable insights, improved effectiveness and compliance.
Cost savings
Click Learning has also brought the charity considerable cost savings; for example, through the unlimited course licensing model, combined with license recycling, which allows licenses to be transferred from leaving staff to new hires. As Tracy put it:
“(We’ve) saved a significant amount of money over the years.”
She also highlighted the advantages of being able to reinstate accounts and training history for returning staff in the ever-changing social care sector.
Course quality
Tracy shared that feedback from staff has been overwhelmingly positive:
“New staff find the platform easy and fun to use. Many staff members with previous eLearning experience find the layout of content and activities refreshing and engaging.”
The courses themselves are a major improvement. The online Care Certificate, for example, has simplified the assessment process for both staff and managers, enabling more efficient completion and assessment. Additionally, Click’s ability to provide access to the Oliver McGowan Mandatory Training has also simplified monitoring and compliance.
To date, Aspens Charities staff have completed over 34,000 Flourish courses, with First Aid Skills as the most popular course. There has also been significantly high completion of courses on safeguarding adults and children, infection prevention and control and moving and handling of people, as well as other courses included in the 15 Care Certificate standards, demonstrating how the Click Learning platform is helping Aspens Charities with Care Certificate compliance.
“The online Care Certificate course has allowed us to move away from paper-based versions which were impractical for both staff and managers.” – Tracy Wilkins
The Aspens team have particularly valued Flourish for their support in training their social care leaders. They enjoyed significant time savings by accessing the Well Led Programme for managers in social care through Flourish, who managed the Workforce Development Fund for them. The varied management courses provided by Click Learning have also been key to enhancing leadership and management capabilities. Tracy noted:
“Flourish offers an incredible variety of courses that are constantly updated based on customer demand. This includes management courses that support our Management Framework.”
Click Learning offers an Adult Care Leadership Course Bundle, covering the essential skills needed for social care leaders to stay engaged, motivated and ready to tackle challenges whilst driving improvement in their teams.
When asked if they would recommend Click Learning, Tract answered:
“Absolutely, without hesitation. We would 100% recommend Flourish and their Click products—they are brilliant.”
