Partners in Support: building confidence in training compliance with Access Learning for Care 

Partners in Support Ltd is a non-profit Supported Living organisation based in Hertfordshire, supporting adults with learning disabilities and/or autism. Delivering consistently high-quality, person-centred Support in this sector depends on a workforce that is properly trained and whose compliance can be evidenced at any time, which made training management a natural place to start when the organisation looked at how Access could support them. 

Before implementing Access, Partners in Support relied on a training system that struggled to keep pace with the sector's demands. Mandatory training in the Supported Living sector requires constant refreshing, but their previous online training took considerably longer to complete than it needed to. Crucially, the old system had no auto-enrolment functionality, meaning every enrolment and every refresher had to be arranged manually; a time-consuming, process.  

Access Learning for Care is where Partners in Support has seen the clearest, most tangible change in how they work, and it's the product their team speaks about with the most confidence. 

A wider, more relevant range of training 

The organisation can now enrol staff on a much wider range of training courses, specifically chosen to align with the legislation that governs their sector. Rather than working around the limitations of their previous system, training now maps directly to what their regulator and their people actually need. 

Competencies built in, not bolted on 

One feature stood out as particularly valuable: the ability to build short competency quizzes directly into the training itself. This gave Partners in Support a straightforward way to check understanding, not just completion, turning training from a box-ticking exercise into a genuine measure of staff capability. 

Compliance the team can trust 

Day to day, the team tracks mandatory training compliance using the team activity log. Partners in Support describe themselves as feeling “confident” in their compliance position at any given time, a marked step up from the manual process the previous system demanded. 

Benefits within months, not years 

Partners in Support didn't have to wait long to see the value: within a couple of months, as their first round of refresher training came due, the benefits of automated enrolment and a wider course library were already being felt across the team. 

Alongside Access Learning for Care, Partners in Support has also implemented Access Care Rostering as part of a wider move towards a single, joined-up Access platform for managing their workforce. Rollout is still under way, and the organisation is candid that it's early days - they haven't yet moved to using the system fully day to day. What they do have is a foundation: the same underlying platform as their training system, and a plan to bring rostering fully into how the organisation operates as implementation continues. 

Perhaps the most meaningful outcome for Partners in Support isn't a time saving on a spreadsheet, it's a shift in where their team's attention now goes. With training enrolment and refreshers no longer requiring constant manual intervention, the organisation has been able to focus more of its energy on developing its staff, rather than just keeping their paperwork current. 

The organisation is candid that overall admin time savings are hard to pin down precisely, particularly as they've had to adjust to a new chatbot-based support model, but they have real praise for the people behind the product and what it now gives them.