Senior leaders from across health, care and education have come together to explore how closer collaboration can help build the workforce needed to meet the region’s changing health and care needs.
The Health Sector Skills Summit, hosted by Inspire Education Group in collaboration with North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust, brought together representatives from Anglia Ruskin University, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, Cambridgeshire Chambers of Commerce, Inspire Education Group, NHS Alliance, NHS England and Peterborough City Council, alongside colleagues from North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust.
The summit focused on two key areas: understanding the skills and competencies the local health and care sector needs now and in the future, and how the sector can work with education providers to develop them.
Opening the event, Rachel Nicholls, Chief Executive Officer of Inspire Education Group, set the challenge of how the region can develop today the workforce it will need in the years ahead.
Rachel highlighted the scale of the opportunity for education and employers to work together, particularly as technology, workforce demographics and models of care continue to change. She also emphasised the importance of creating clear pathways into the sector, strengthening employability and digital skills, supporting people who are currently outside education or employment, and involving employers earlier in curriculum design, placements, apprenticeships and workforce development.
IEG currently supports more than 320 full-time learners across Health, Social Care, Adult Nursing and Health Care Support programmes from Level 1 to Level 3, alongside adult learners studying counselling pathways through to Higher Education. The Group's wider pathways span further education, T Levels and industry placements, apprenticeships, higher education and professional development.
The discussion was also placed in the context of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Local Skills Improvement Plan 2026–2029, which identifies significant demand within health and care. The plan highlights the NHS as the region's largest recruiter, while recruitment remains challenging for occupations including nursing and specialist medical roles. It also points towards a changing skills landscape as healthcare moves increasingly towards community-based care, digital delivery and prevention.
Charlotte Williams, Deputy CEO of North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust, then set out the NHS perspective, highlighting the breadth of its workforce beyond clinical roles, including careers across digital, estates, finance, HR and other professional services.
She outlined how the NHS's future workforce will need to respond to three significant shifts in how care is delivered: from hospital to community, from analogue to digital, and from sickness to prevention. These changes will require skills ranging from specialist clinical expertise and digital and AI literacy to data, population health, innovation, change management and partnership working.
The summit also recognised the challenges facing the sector, including financial pressures, fewer entry-level opportunities, pressures on placements and work experience, and the need to ensure qualifications translate effectively into workplace readiness.
Examples shared during the morning demonstrated what closer collaboration can already look like in practice.
Peterborough College T Level Health students recently responded to real NHS transformation priorities through the Lincolnshire NHS Health Challenge. Students developed ideas including Homekind, an app supporting patients moving from hospital to home, and Easy Obs, a digital concept designed to reduce pressure on nurses. Both teams were category winners and were given opportunities to explore how their ideas could be developed further with the Lincolnshire NHS Talent Academy.
The event also highlighted individual pathways into the workforce. Peterborough College T Level Adult Nursing student Mia Ward gained industry experience at Peterborough Hospital and Chestnut Care Home before progressing to study Adult Nursing at ARU Peterborough, while Stamford College Health and Social Care student Lily Spencer progressed to a Pharmacy Apprenticeship with Superdrug.
The second half of the summit moved from identifying challenges to considering what partners could do differently together. Through facilitated discussions, attendees explored how health and care providers can work more effectively with education providers to build a sustainable local workforce pipeline, develop the skills of existing employees, widen access to careers and use their collective role to improve local opportunities and life chances.
The discussions will now help inform the next steps for collaboration between education and health partners, with a focus on turning the ideas generated through the summit into practical action.
For Inspire Education Group, the summit forms part of a wider commitment to ensuring education and training continues to respond to employer needs, while creating accessible routes for young people and adults to develop the skills required by the region's future workforce.
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