Description of the contract
Background
The work responds to the Digital Potential Tool (DPT) – Wales's first national measure of digital maturity and literacy in the social care sector - Understand your digital potential | Social Care Wales. There’s a clear confidence gap in digital leadership, especially in local authorities, 25% of local authority leaders say they rarely or never feel equipped to lead digital change, compared to 10% in the private and third sectors. However, while the independent sector shows more confidence, they also face challenges with strategic planning, consistency, and access to support. Only a third say they always have clear digital plans, and many still report gaps in training and infrastructure. Both groups need tailored support to build leadership confidence and turn digital ambitions into action.
The Copilot Readiness Report (ADSS Cymru, March 2025) highlights a wider leadership confidence gap in digital transformation across adult social care. While there is clear enthusiasm for innovation, many leaders, particularly in local authorities, report feeling underprepared to lead change. This is linked to limited awareness of emerging technologies, uncertainty around governance and ethics, and concerns about workforce impact. Even in more agile or digitally mature organisations, translating strategic ambition into practical implementation remains a challenge. The report recommends tailored support for leaders at all levels, including hands-on training, clear national guidance, and peer networks, to build confidence and ensure that digital tools are adopted safely, ethically, and in ways that strengthen person-centred care.
The Digital Leadership Support Programme will:
- trial different approaches across varied organisational contexts.
- gather insights and generate evidence, through built-in evaluation, to inform future support offers.
- ensure future investments are grounded in real-world experiences and tailored to sector needs.
The programme will also support the national Digital and data strategy for health and social care in Wales [HTML] | GOV.WALES, which emphasises digital leadership to improve outcomes, enhance efficiency, and support independence.
Aims and Objectives
The aims of the programme are to:
- Strengthen confidence and capability among senior leaders and managers across the Welsh social care sector to lead digital change, with a focus on practical application and real-world relevance.
- Test and evaluate effective models of digital leadership support, generating practical insights that inform future national support offers.
- Create the conditions for sustainable digital transformation ensuring that digital innovation is not just a technical upgrade, but a cultural shift that empowers people, improves services, and strengthens the sector’s resilience for the future.
- Address the leadership confidence gap identified by the DPT by fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement, supporting leaders to create the conditions for digital transformation within their teams and services.
- To contribute to national digital priorities by enabling social care leaders to use digital tools and approaches to improve care outcomes and organisational efficiency.
The objectives of the programme are to:
- Provide a range of tailored, hands-on, digital leadership support approaches across diverse organisational contexts (e.g. local authorities, third sector, private sector) to help organisations identify, test and learn from small-scale digital improvements.
- Strengthen collaboration and shared learning across organisations, sectors and regions through peer learning and cross-organisational activities.
- Embed robust evaluation mechanisms and reflection to capture impact, inform future investment, and support long-term development.
- Generate insights to shape future support by testing what works, for whom, and in what context - ensuring that future digital leadership development is evidence-informed and responsive to sector needs.
- To demonstrate how the programme supports national strategies, including the Digital and Data Strategy for Health and Social Care in Wales and the Workforce Strategy for Health and Social Care.
What is required / ‘The Requirements’
We are seeking a suitably skilled and knowledgeable supplier to design and evaluate a structured approach to building digital leadership capacity across a minimum of three social care organisations in Wales. The designed approach should be accessible to all social care provider organisations in Wales, including private and third-sector providers. It should have enough flexibility to be tailored to meet the needs of each participating organisation.
The successful supplier must demonstrate proven expertise in digital transformation and change, along with the capacity to work sensitively alongside leaders and managers with different levels of knowledge and confidence.
We anticipate that the supplier will design and evaluate the approach with at least 3 different organisations, including local authority, private and third sector providers. Social Care Wales can support the supplier to make contact with social care organisations.
The supplier must maintain regular contact with the Social Care Wales team to ensure that the work remains responsive to emerging insights and organisational needs, within the project’s aims, and is completed within the project deadlines.
The successful supplier will:
1. Design and evaluate an approach to supporting leaders with digital change and transformation through a blend of activities, including:
- Coaching and mentoring for individuals or groups.
- Team or organisational learning sessions. These will be agreed as needed with the social care leaders or managers being supported and could focus on leadership, digital change, practical use of technology, risk and opportunity.
- Mini innovation sprints to implement new digital or technology within the organisation.
- Embedded evaluation and knowledge sharing throughout the project design and delivery.
- Other forms of tailored support to leaders and managers, as needed and feasible within the contract’s aims and scope.
2.Build suitable evaluation methods into the evaluation phase, which enable the supplier to learn and develop their approach, and lead to clear and actionable final recommendations. The evaluation should consider the most suitable approaches to support leaders, the target audience for support, and the context in which leaders and managers work.
3.Develop a final report with learning, evaluation and recommendations. This should take account of existing support for innovation in social care, including the support offered by Social Care Wales.
Please see Specification for more details
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