Our History

Oilean has its roots in the 1980's. The Directors worked together running the Short Stay Refuge for Adolescents, an urban funded project. The Refuge was the first and so far only resource of its kind aimed at supporting young people who were in danger of running away from home, being admitted to care or becoming homeless. The Refuge developed a reputation not just for advocacy for young people but also for excellence in its staff development.

A number of the staff, including the current Directors considered the idea of setting up a training company called Rainbow around 1988. However as many will remember the 1980's were the Thatcher years and social work was undergoing major reorganisations. Whenever there were cutbacks training was the first area to be slashed and social work was generally suspicious of private sector training providers. So it was decided to shelve Rainbow....

Over the 1990's and the first few years of this millennium everyone went their own seperate ways until in 2003 Jean and John got back together with a few friends and colleagues from the 1980 and 90's. Following the introduction of the Regulation of Care Act 2001 the social care culture again underwent major change, the Care Commission and the Social Services Council were established and minumum levels of training and qualifications for all social care staff were set, SVQs had been introduced into care, Broadband had been invented. It was an opportune time to resurrect Rainbow.

After searching Companies House register it was decided to change the name from Rainbow to Oilean which is Gaelic for Training and Nurture, which  encapsulates our learning and development philosophy. Oilean was acreditted as an SQA centre  in 2005 and has developed into an independent centre providing a wide range of SVQ qualifications to the social care sector. The rest, as they say, is history....

Many of the ideas for presenting training and staff development are based on our experiences since the 1980's. The intervening years working for a variety of employers convinced us of the validity of our style of presentation. We believe that by combining taught input with SVQ assessment we can reduce the assessmnent time for competent and confident staff. We offer SVQs on a semi-taught programme which involves candidates in study days in gaining the knowledge requirements for their qualifications. The study days provide focus for the candidate’s performance and all the evidence supports the company's view that candidates will complete more confidently than simply undergoing assessment by traditional methods.  We are constantly looking for ways to innovate and to improve the experience that candidates have of SVQs and our other awards.

Oilean is Gaelic for training and nurture and describes the service that the company aims to offer. As a company Oilean has gone from strength to strength over the last four years and offers a wide range of qualifications including all the Health and Social Care SVQs, Management SVQs, Community Justice SVQs, A1, V1 and Workplace Core Skills. The company is now also the only independent provider of  HNC in Social Care and the Certificate in Social Care Management in Scotland.