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How care provider New Directions Rugby uses the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set

27 Oct 2025

3 min read

Paul Tolley

ASC-WDS

Paul Tolley, CEO, New Directions Rugby tells us how they use the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS) to support their organisation.

New Directions Rugby is a social care provider that will celebrate its 75th year of providing care and accommodation in 2026. Employing over 200 staff and supporting over 100 people each day, we provide residential care through two care homes, a variety of supported living accommodation for up to 75 people, day opportunities services and respite.

As a self-confessed ‘geek’ I love using data to plot, monitor and evidence improvements in performance across the organisation. I provide our managers with live dashboards to ensure that the organisational position and each individual service can report on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Whether it is New Direction’s journey to achieving 93% occupancy in our respite service, our 99.5% training compliance rate or our 99.5% safe administration rate of over 150,000 instances of supporting individuals with their medication, there’s a KPI, a chart and a trend that demonstrates our commitment to continuous improvement.

Little wonder then that New Directions Rugby uses the ASC-WDS data set. Not just passively entering data on a routine basis, but using the data to benchmark our own delivery against the rest of the sector across the region.

We use the data set in a number of ways to help us.

We use the regional data on turnover of staff to monitor and compare our own turnover. Whilst historically we have compared favourably with the regional average levels, analysing our data led us to explore how we could work differently and resulted in our use of the tool ZINC which has dramatically improved our recruitment and retention. We have shortened the amount of time it takes to recruit individuals and have the lowest level of vacancies we have seen in the last six years.

We used our data insights to focus on the ‘net gain’ of staffing each year and identified that despite recruiting 183 permanent staff between April 2020 and April 2024, a net gain of only two full-time equivalent (FTE) staff was achieved within this four-year period. Compare this to the last 18 months with our new focused approach and we’ve had a net-gain of 31 staff, an incredible and significant shift.

ASC-WDS also enables providers to keep track of their staff training to ensure evidenced compliance and again, this is an area where we’ve adapted our approach to monitoring data to achieve real impact.

Thanks to John Weekes, our Learning and Development Manager, we’ve completely revamped our induction and training programme over the last four years, moving from a position of heavily relying upon eLearning to designing and implementing our own in-house bespoke programme. Previously, chasing staff to evidence their eLearning certificates left us exposed as a provider and gave little engagement for our staff. We map all our training and expiry dates to give each service a clear report on all staff due to have their training expire within the next 30 days and our training matrix provides a live dashboard that illustrates each service’s individual level of compliance for all of our mandatory core training.

The significant investment in training and development, as well as using the Learning and Development Support Scheme (LDSS) alongside the Apprenticeship Levy has seen our evidenced training compliance for all 200+ staff rocket from circa 70% to an impressive 99.5%.

As an organisation that is currently using the Care Workforce Pathway to support our staff’s training and development, being able to access the Learning and Development Support Scheme (LDSS) by having an ASC-WDS account is really important to us. We can also map our team structure against the role categories from the Care Workforce Pathway in ASC-WDS and this supports us with ensuring team members are getting the relevant training for these roles.

I firmly believe that social care organisations fall into one of three categories. The first is not using or supplying ASC-WDS data at all and is yet to start their journey; the second is completing the data routinely but not analysing it, and the third is actively using the data and analysing it to change and improve the way they work.

I’m very happy that here at New Directions Rugby, we fall into the latter category and can evidence the changes that work and help us to continuously improve.