Our Nomination for the SQA Star Award 2007 – Candidate of the Year is Rhona McGregor, Service Manager for Real Life Options.
The Nomination was Highly Commended. The following was our nomination.
"Rhona is a service manager for Real Life Options in a residential unit in Angus for 12 men with learning disabilities and “forensic” issues. All these men have committed offences, many of them of a violent or sexual nature. Needless to say it is a complex service in which the staff face many challenges. The clients can be very challenging and protecting the community within a service in which the client’s rights are central to everything you do is quite complicated.
So when Rhona was looking for an award which matched those challenging requirements it is not surprising that she chose Community Justice Level 4. She had already achieved her Registered Manager Award through her local college in Tayside. She approached Oilean as one of the few centres offering SVQs in Community Justice and in the knowledge that they offered a mentoring style of assessment. As a Centre Oilean has gained a reputation for providing quality real time support to all candidates. As a result candidate completion rates are high, and the time to successfully gain a qualification is accelerated. Many employers have recognized the economic benefits of this model of developing an inspired, confident and competent workforce who are able to contribute much more effectively than those assessed by traditional methods.
Real Life Options vision is of a society in which disabilities are not a barrier to people taking control of their lives. Their mission is to:
· Be passionate about delivering high quality personal support to customers who have a disability
· Have a responsive and flexible approach in all areas of their activities
· Provide professional, innovative and effective customer focused services.
Real Life Options (RLO) strives to provide self-directed support that puts people with disabilities in control of their own lives. They work to ensure people with disabilities have equal rights as citizens and are entitled to receive support to maximise their independence and social inclusion, and to exercise choice about their own lives.
Real Life Options has a national reputation as an innovative provider with a range of service models which allow for individualised support packages. These include:
- Individual tenancies with 24 hour support.
- Specialist care homes for people with high support needs, including profound physical disabilities, complex or challenging behaviours.
- Adapted flats for one or two people, within multiple occupancy buildings.
- Adapted bungalows within a serviced site, to provide accommodation on an individual basis.
- Supported living models for up to four people sharing a tenancy
With the support of her assessor Rhona completed her Level 4 award in three months. She had a wealth of experience and according to her assessor, a wealth of evidence!
Rhona left school with three “0” levels, in Home Economics, English and Biology. When she left school she worked in a variety of factory jobs and raised her family. Rhona says she needed more stimulation than looking after her family so joined the care profession in 1993 as a domestic assistant. She liked the hours! She offered to do some auxiliary work and since most residential units are short-staffed she was quickly snapped up.
Her drive and enthusiasm and natural abilities propelled her through the ranks over the next decade with a variety of different voluntary organizations, working with a variety of different client groups. She joined Real Life Options in 2002.
In 2004 she got her first SQA award, the assessor award, D32 and 33, since then she has achieved both her Registered Managers Award and now her Level 4 in Community Justice. She has completed her awards ahead of the norm and the rest of her class. Each award has secured her position and allowed her to move up in her organization. She identified the SVQ in Community Justice as being an appropriate award for herself and her organization in view of structural changes in the management of services to offenders in the community. She identified the completion of Community Justice Award as an opportunity for herself and her organization to create links in the development of offenders services and keep her organization “ahead of the game”
Rhona likes the SVQ system since she sees the writing down of her work makes her reflect on what she does. She sees the process as one in which she has gained knowledge and understanding of processes. She is very keen on passing knowledge to her staff team and actively uses SQA qualifications within the staff development plan. She uses her positive understanding of the standards to support her staff in interpreting the language of SVQs.
As manager she is responsible for 34 staff and a budget of £0.75m. Her qualifications have enabled her to act up to Divisional Manager for the last 5 months with much greater responsibilities for 7 similar services.
Rhona has had various experiences of assessors. She says a good assessor will keep her motivated, and maintain the candidate’s eye on deadlines. The mentoring style support in doing her most recent award has enabled her to pass on her enthusiasm for this style of learning to her staff team.
Rhona thinks SQA awards are a “fantastic training tool”. She says the awards fit with induction training, and enables the candidates to link their learning on in-house training with their personal development and qualifications. She sees improvements in day to day work practices as a result of staff / candidates reading and understanding knowledge specification and improving their insight into their own and their colleagues practice. As a consequence she sees the style of the award as contributing to the safety of her local community since a confident staff team will be able to provide a higher quality of service to the men they have to both care for and control.
Having found SQA qualifications she says she will continue to seek opportunities for self-development as well as the development of her staff-team and the services her employer provides."
