Minerva > SSW Induction

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Section 1: About us

Mulberry Education provides specialist support to people whose learning difficulty, mental health, neurodiversity or disability would otherwise stop them from fully demonstrating their academic potential. In the industry, we are known as a Non-Medical Help Provider (often written NMH Provider).

We set up Mulberry Education because we wanted to improve the quality and effectiveness of the support available to students. We are a community of specialist support workers who are passionate about helping the students we work with to be the best they can be.

We are working to empower students...

With less of this...

and more of this...

Empowering the student to be independent
Helping students to communicate and work effectively by themselves
Students holding responsibility for their own learning
Pausing to let students have time to process and respond
Working as a partner with the student, teaching staff, and other support staff

... and develop professional collaboration

With less of this...

and more of this...

How our work is funded

Our work is funded by the Student Loans Company (through SFE, SFW, SFNI), NHS Bursaries, and the university where the student studies (also referred to their Higher Education Institution, or HEI) .

We mostly work with students in receipt of Disabled Student Allowances (DSA), but we also support apprentices and other students who are not entitled to DSA.

The types of support we provide

The Department for Education defines the types of support in their regulations for Disabled Student Allowances (DSA). We focus on providing two types of DSA support:

Specialist Mentor Support

A specialist mentor:

Helps students to recognise barriers to learning created as a result of the reason they have been awarded DSA.
Supports students to develop strategies to address these barriers.

They can have the following specialities:

Autistic Spectrum Mentor support (AS M)
Mental Health Mentor support (MH M)

This support may include:

Planning how to manage workload or competing time pressures
Managing concentration difficulties
Improving time management and planning
Developing strategies to cope with anxiety or stressful situations
Developing strategies to manage mental health conditions

The support cannot:

Specialist Study Skills Support

A specialist study skills tutor:

Helps students develop their skills and become more independent learners.
Together with students, set clear goals alongside timescales for achieving these goals.

They can have the following specialities:

Autistic Spectrum Study Skills support (AS SS)
Specific Learning Difficulty Study Skills support (SpLD SS)

This support may include:

Improving organisation, time management and planning
Improving focus and managing distractions
Developing research techniques
Reading effectively and efficiently
Understanding the academic expectations in Higher Education

The support cannot:

Our contact details

Bil Rose

Bil usually takes the lead on:

HR
Student engagement
Student setup
Safeguarding

Bil’s usual workdays are Tuesday to Friday.

bil@mulberryeducation.co.uk

07930 713 788

Jacob Brittain

Jacob usually takes the lead on:

Cudos and Minerva
Pay and finance
Data protection
Policies

Jacob’s usual workdays are Monday to Thursday.

jacob@mulberryeducation.co.uk

07930 713 752

Other important contact details you will come across:

01803 866 372

This is the our virtual landline number and it redirects to Jacob or Bil’s mobile numbers.

admin@mulberryeducation.co.uk

This is the main email address that students, Needs Assessors and universities will contact.

supportworkers@mulberryeducation.co.uk

You can contact us through this address if you have information or queries that either Bil or Jacob could address, or if you want to send us documents.

feedback@mulberryeducation.co.uk

This is the address that students and universities are invited to send feedback via.

Section 2: About you

Keeping us updated if your details change

You have already given us your contact details, your emergency contact’s details, and your payment details via our online form.

If any of your details change, please let us know by emailing us or by completing the SSW details form again, which is on Minerva in the “Send us an update” section.

Declaring conflicts of interest

We take steps to ensure that there are no actual or perceived conflicts of interest in the work that we do in order to ensure the public funds that we receive are managed transparently and ethically.

We have a two stage process to manage conflicts of interest:

Firstly, all support workers are required to complete the conflict of interest form via this link.
Secondly, a document called the “Declaration of Interests” is created to formally summarise the nature of the conflict and steps taken to address it. This document is sent to you via email for your digital signature and is countersigned by Mulberry Education. It will be shared with the Department for Education and the Welsh Government.

There is more information about what a conflict of interest is at the top of the form. Note that working as a freelance support worker with another Non-Medical Help Provider is not necessarily a conflict of interest.

DBS checks

Some universities we work with regularly have under-18s on campus, and so require support workers to have had a DBS check.

If you already have a recent DBS check or if you subscribe to the DBS Update Service, please supply us with the details.

If you haven’t got a recent certificate or aren’t a subscriber, we will apply for a DBS check if necessary.

Section 3: The contracts of work

You will be working with Mulberry Education as a self-employed, freelance specialist support worker. The details of working with Mulberry Education are establish by two agreements. It is important that you read and understand them.

The two documents are:

The Association Agreement
The Data Processing Agreement

After your induction meeting, you will be sent these documents in emails from eSignatures.io so you can read through them at your leisure and digitally sign them.

Please contact Jacob if you have any questions or want to discuss any part of the agreements.

Section 4: The Quality Assurance Framework

The Quality Assurance Framework (the QAF) comprises the rules and standards that Mulberry Education as a Non-Medical Help Provider and you as a support worker must follow.

It contains four sections: sections 1 and 2 contain standards for Mulberry Education to follow, and sections 3 and 4 contain standards that you must follow. We have designed our procedures and systems so that you will follow these standards automatically.

We have included sections 3 and 4 for you below. If you wish, you can read the full QAF here.

We will let you know when the QAF is updated.

3.1 The support worker will only attend sessions that are booked and confirmed with the student

The support worker must make sure that all sessions are booked and confirmed with the student.

‘Booked’ means that the student has agreed the date, time, location and support role in advance of each session.

‘Confirmed’ means the details of the booked session have been checked with the student using the student’s preferred method of communication between 24 hours and 7 days in advance, where appropriate.

3.2 The support worker will ensure the student understands the cancellation procedure.

The support worker must ensure students are aware of the cancellation policy and confirm that they understand how to cancel a session, the cancellation notification period and the impact of non-cancellation.

3.3 The support worker will keep clear documents evidencing work carried out.

The support worker must keep clear evidence of the work undertaken with the student.

3.4 The support worker will advise students of the process when additional NMH support is required.

If the student requests additional hours of support, the support worker must tell the student to contact their assessor, who will consider the request and liaise with the funding body to gain authorisation for any additional support.

3.5 The support worker is responsible for undertaking training

The support worker must have attended training on the following areas before delivering support:

Data Protection and Confidentiality
Health and Safety
Lone Working
Safeguarding
Professional Boundaries

4.1 The support worker is suitably qualified to provide the support.

The support worker must only deliver support in the roles for which they meet the mandatory criteria.

4.2 The support worker will have an agreed work plan with the student.

The support worker and the student should agree the work to be undertaken and expected outcomes.

4.3 The support worker will only provide support in a suitable environment.

The location/environment for specialist one-to-one support must be comfortable, confidential, appropriate and suitable for the requirements of the student’s support. It should also take account of the student’s disability needs.

Method of delivery, whether face-to-face or remote, must be student choice and requested by them.

Please note, support via email is not appropriate.

4.4 The support worker maintains CPD and training records.

The support worker who provide either or both of the AS support roles must ensure they undertake 10 hours CPD and relevant training annually, covering as a minimum relevant professional development in their specialist roles and updating skills in new practices.

CPD and personal training records must be maintained and made available for audit.

Section 5: Our policies

These are our policies. It’s important that you are familiar with their contents before you start working with students, and they should be considered alongside the QAF, the Association Agreement and the Data Protection Agreement.

If you have any questions or want to discuss any aspect of them, please do contact Jacob.

Section 6: Mandatory criteria, training and qualifications

There are two broad areas of training and qualifications that support workers are required to have in order to support students under the Quality Assurance Framework:

The mandatory criteria: qualifications, profession body memberships, and CPD
The core training

You can check the CPD and qualifications that we have for you on Minerva in the Restricted folders section.

The mandatory criteria: qualifications, profession body memberships, and CPD

Support workers may only work in the support roles that they are qualified for, and the Department for Education and the Welsh Government will check this when we are audited. You must make sure you take steps to maintain your mandatory qualifications, professional body memberships and CPD requirements for as long as you are working as a specialist support worker. If your mandatory qualifications or memberships lapse for any support role, then you will have to stop providing that immediately.

Below is a summary of the mandatory criteria for each of the support roles we provide. If you are interested in qualifying for other support roles, the latest full mandatory criteria document is available via the button here.

More about the CPD requirements for AS support roles

Specialist support workers in the AS roles are required to undertake and keep a record of 10 hours of Continuing Professional Development each year. We will ask for your CPD record at the start of each year.

CPD is automatically thought of as formal training but professional development can include a wide range of activities. While attending lectures, conferences and courses remains a key aspect, it is important to realise that the majority of learning comes from experience day-to-day.

We will let you know of CPD opportunities that we come across.

The following list of CPD activities is not exhaustive, but it will provide you with some idea of the types of activity that support workers can undertake which will contribute to their CPD:

Work based learning such as reflective practice, work shadowing, coaching from others or undertaking a project.
Self-directed learning such as reading journals/articles, updating knowledge through the internet or television, and keeping a file of progress.
Professional activity such as involvement in a professional body, organising journal clubs or other specialist groups or membership of a specialist interest group.
Formal/educational activity such as courses, workshops, attending conferences, writing articles or papers, or going to seminars.
Voluntary work in the area the support worker is delivering support in.

Frequently Asked Questions

If I provide both roles, do I need to log 20 hours of support?

No. The same 10 hours of CPD will be used for both roles.

When do I need to send my CPD log to you?

We’ll ask for it once a year in May.
We will also ask for it if/when we get audited by DfE.

Do I need to send you anything else to do with my CPD?

No. We don’t need certificates or any other evidence for the CPD you’ve undertaken. Just the CPD log.
We also don’t need the other CPD logs you might keep for professional body memberships if you provide the Mental Health mentoring or SpLD study skills roles. For those roles, we just need evidence of your continued professional body memberships.

What counts as CPD?

This could be certificated courses or events, but it could also be self-directed learning (such as articles you’ve read or YouTube videos you’ve watched).
The topic of whatever you do can be related to autism, or related to disability in general, or relevant to the role (such as data protection training), or connected to learning/HE.

The core training

The QAF requires specialist support workers to undertake training in the following areas:

Data Protection and Confidentiality
Health and Safety
Lone Working
Safeguarding
Professional Boundaries

If you have completed recent qualifications in any of these areas, please let us know so you don’t have to do them again. We will need to have a copy of the certificates as evidence.

If you have not recently completed any of these, Mulberry Education will pay for you to undertake these courses through an online supplier accredited by the CPD Standards Office or a similar body.

You need to have completed these courses in order to work with students.

Section 7: Professional boundaries

You are in a position of authority in relation to the student, and you have a responsibility to use this authority inherent in the relationship appropriately and ethically. It is important that you are aware of the boundaries of your relationship with the student so that you can support them effectively.

If you have any questions or concerns about boundaries within your role, please speak with Bil or Jacob.

Be aware of dual relationships

Dual relationships are when you have a separate relationship with the student outside of your professional relationship as a specialist support worker. For example, you may know them in a personal capacity (they could be related to a friend of yours, or you might be neighbours), or as a peer (you might be studying on the same course), or in a different professional capacity.

Let us know if you already have a relationship with a student who we ask you to work with. We’ll discuss the situation with you, and we’ll decide together whether it’s appropriate to start this professional support relationship with them too.

Part of maintaining professional boundaries is taking steps to ensure a new dual relationship doesn’t develop alongside your professional relationship.

Maintain physical and emotional boundaries

Never enter into a sexual or intimate relationship with a student. It is never appropriate due to the imbalance in authority and power.

We would recommend refraining from discussing your personal life the student. Sometimes it might be appropriate to share personal details with a student with absolute attention to the relevance to the student’s support needs.

Be clear about when students can access support from you

Consider the timings of your meetings with your student. Saying something like “You can call me whenever you need to” can seem reassuring, but in reality it isn’t helpful and could be dangerous. What if they call you in a crisis but you’re unavailable?

Make sure the student knows who else they can contact if they need help. The university will have a student support team who act as a hub for additional support outside of your remit. There is also a section on our website that lists useful sources of support: https://www.mulberryeducation.co.uk/students/sources-of-support/

Sharing your contact information

Consider whether you want to have a separate work email from your personal email. Some support workers also have a separate work phone number so they can keep their work and personal lives separate more easily. Please let us know if you have particular contact details for students so we can make sure the right ones are used on our systems.

Consider whether you want to set any rules around the student contacting you. For example, you may want to tell the student your work hours and let them know that you’ll reply to communication within those times.

Protect your privacy on social media

Don’t share your personal social media details with the student. Make sure your social media settings protect your private information. It’s worth reviewing your privacy settings regularly to cover new features that may have been added.

Section 8: Risk Assessments and Risk Management:

We have four documents that specialist support workers will regularly come into contact with when considering risk management:

Staff risk assessment
Off-site risk assessment
Keeping Well
Positive Support Plan

These documents are also available on Minerva under “Useful resources” in the section called “Risk Management”.

Staff Risk Assessment

This risk assessment encourages staff (both employees and associates) to consider the potential likely risks and opportunities to reduce risks associated with your work, and it’s structured under these broad headings:

Work environment
Work equipment
Fire safety
Travelling
Mental wellbeing
Lone Working

You are required to read the staff risk assessment. If there are particular risks that you feel that Mulberry Education should know about in order to keep you safe or to make reasonable adjustments, please write the information under “Individual Factors” (at the end of the document) and return the file to us. We will make time to discuss the additions with you at an appropriate time.

If you send us a staff risk assessment with your own additions, it will be held by Mulberry Education and will treated as confidential information.

Off-site Risk Assessment

This risk assessment is required if a specialist support worker is supporting a student in-person away from their university.

Specialist support workers are only allowed to support students off-site if the student has requested this or they are a Distance Learner (e.g. if the student studies with the Open University).

Supporting a student off-site presents additional risks to those presented by supporting them at their place of study, and these risks need to be reduced in order for this to be acceptable. This risk assessment encourages the specialist support worker to consider:

Work environment
Work equipment
Fire safety
Travelling
Mental wellbeing
Lone Working

The “Keeping Well” and “Positive Support Plan” documents

It may be necessary to discuss risk management with a student, for example if there is something that Mulberry Education or the specialist support worker needs to know in order to help keep the student safe.

We have developed the “Keeping Well” and “Positive Support Plan” documents to help manage these risks and promote this as a collaborative process between the student and the specialist support worker.

Risks may be identified in the student’s Needs Assessment Report or by their university’s Disability Advisor Team, and this will be highlighted to the specialist support worker by Mulberry Education before their first meeting with the student. Sometimes a risk may only be identified or arise once the specialist support worker has already met with the student. In this case, the specialist support worker should inform Mulberry Education as soon as is practicable so that we can work together in order to assess the risks.

On the Keeping Well document, there is a space to record the details of people the student would like to be contacted. It is important that we have on record that the student has given us explicit consent to contact the people named here. The student can do that in two ways:

The student can give us permission to talk specific people when they first complete our data protection form, before we refer them to you.
Alternatively, they can give us explicit consent at a later date during their studies by completing our student data protection update form (a link to this is on Minerva).

You can find the student’s data protection responses on Minerva in the student’s folder.

Section 9: The student's journey

The journey to receiving support can be a long one for students. They may not apply for the support until they have had difficulty at university, and so they may be in urgent need of support when they first make contact with us.

So, we want to make it as quick and easy a process for them to start receiving their support once we know about them.

First stage: When we are first in contact with the student

We’re first made aware of the student when they are referred to us by their university Disability Advisor Team or they contact Mulberry Education directly.

The first thing we do is gather the student’s contact details, course details and data protection choices. We try to get the student’s Needs Assessment Report at this stage but sometimes it’s not possible and so the information we have may be limited.

Once we have the student’s details, we let them know that their specialist support worker will be in contact within the next few days. At this stage, we remind them what support they have been awarded. Students are awarded a certain number of hours of support to use in a set time frame (usually per academic year) and we recommend that they plan with their support worker how to use all their hours. We also tell the student important information that they need to know about through the Student Information Pack. This includes information such as the policy for booking and cancelling meetings and how to give feedback.

Second stage: Passing the student over to you

Next, we send the student’s information to the support worker who would best match their needs. We will email you this information, so it is very important that you monitor your mailbox for these emails. Please let us know quickly if you would prefer not to work with the student so we can ask the next support worker.

Third stage: Arrange your first meeting with the student

If you are happy to work with the student, please contact them as soon as practicable (at most within a few days of receiving the email from us) to arrange their first meeting with you. If there might be a problem with that, please let us know so we can let the student know.

We need to have a copy of the first meeting booking confirmation of each academic year for our audits. The first meeting booking confirmation needs to have certain information in it (the support type, date of meeting, time of meeting, and place of meeting). In order to make this as easy as possible, we have made an email template that you can use and adapt on Minerva. Please send this first meeting booking confirmation email to the student no matter the method of communication you used to set up the meeting. Please copy in supportworkers@mulberryeducation.co.uk when you send this email so that we know the student’s support has been set up.

At this stage, make sure you:
Contact the student within a few days of the referral. The sooner, the better!
Send the student a first meeting booking confirmation email.
Send us a copy of that first meeting booking confirmation email to supportworkers@mulberryeducation.co.uk.

Fourth stage: In your first meeting

There are a lot of things that need to happen in the first meeting: you need to set out the parameters of the support relationship, gauge how best to support the student, and gather other information to work out what your student needs support with.

The student received information about the support role in the Student Information Pack. However, it’s worth talking with them to explain the support role, what it could be and what it’s not allowed to be. A copy of the Student Information Pack is available on Minerva should you wish to refer to it.

We have an optional resource called the Progression Plan that can help to frame the discussion around the support and identify what could be most useful to focus on. It’s available on Minerva in the student support resource library, which is under “Section 2: Useful resources”.

It’s really important that the student knows the boundaries around the support relationship. Please do set out your work times and days so they know when you might be available. If you were to say you’re available all the time, they may expect you to reply to messages at unreasonable times.

If the student is new to university, they may not know who their personal tutor is or how to contact them. It’s useful to check this with them in the first meeting.

We find that most students get more from their support if they meet with their support worker regularly and use most of their hours. We’ve also found that this is easier to do if the expectations of regular meetings that are treated like any other lecture is set out from the beginning. To help this happen, have a look at the student’s timetable with them to identify the best times for you both to meet each week. Then have a look at the calendar for the academic year and plan with the student how they could use their hours. For example, if a student has been awarded 60 hours for a year, that could equate to 2 hours each week, either in one meeting or in two on separate days. It can also be useful to see when assessments are due or when holidays are booked to identify pinch points when more support might be needed. We have a growing library of resources that includes week planners and calendars that you can use. They are available on Minerva in the student support resource library.

Log the meeting on Cudos. As soon as you log the meeting, an automatic email is sent to the student asking them to accept the meeting’s details. We highly recommend making sure the student can find that email during your first meeting. There is more information on this in the next section.

Finally, confirm the next meeting date, time and location with the student.

At this stage, make sure you:
Discuss the parameters of the support relationship.
Let the student know your work hours and other boundaries.
Check whether the student knows who their academic tutor is and how to contact them.
Log the meeting on a timesheet on Cudos.
Check whether the student knows who their academic tutor is and how to contact them.
Confirm when your next meeting with the student will be.

Section 10: Minerva, Cudos and getting paid

We use two computer systems to help streamline work and minimise the amount of admin that’s needed. They are:

Minerva – our online portal where we share documents and resources
Cudos – our electronic timesheet website

These two systems contain sensitive personal data and so it’s essential that you take robust steps to ensure that there can be no unauthorised access to them. You will have different login details for each of these systems. We highly recommend using a password manager so the passwords are strong and you don’t need to remember them.

If you have any questions or problems with either Cudos or Minerva, Jacob will be happy to help.

Minerva

Minerva is a password protected part of our website for the specialist support workers we work with.

You can access Minerva through our website via the Specialist Support Worker menu, or by going directly to https://www.mulberryeducation.co.uk/minerva/

Cudos

Cudos is our electronic timesheet website.

You use it to log attended and missed support sessions, and submit timesheets to students so they can digitally sign them.

The Cudos user guide explains how to use Cudos and includes a list of frequently asked questions and answers.

Again, you can access Cudos through our website via the Specialist Support Worker menu, or by going directly to https://cudos.mulberryeducation.co.uk/login

Getting paid

There are three steps to being paid for a session:

Log the session on a timesheet in Cudos.
Submit the timesheet to the student for approval.
The student then needs to approve the timesheet by clicking on a link in the timesheet email they receive.

All timesheets that have been approved before 23:59 on the 20^th of each month will be paid for at the end of that month. For example:

A timesheet approved by the student on 19^th September will be paid at the end of September.

A timesheet approved by the student on 21^st September will be paid at the end of October.

Remember that timesheets are NOT automatically submitted to students. You decide when you want to send the timesheet to the student. You can add as many sessions to a single timesheet as you like. Some people put one session on a timesheet and send it to the student at the end of every session, others send a timesheet once a month so the student only receives one email.

We put the information from approved timesheets onto SSW invoices on the first workday after the 20th of each month, and we’ll pay these by the end of the month. Please check that the invoice is correct and let Jacob know if there’s a problem. You can check and download your SSW invoices on Minerva in the “Restricted folders” section.

To make sure there isn’t a delay in being paid for the work you undertake, it’s really important to log the meeting’s details and get the student to approve the timesheets promptly. To help this along, we would highly recommend:

Logging the session at the end of each meeting. You don’t need to wait until after a meeting to log it. Don’t save them up!

Guiding the student through finding the timesheet email and accepting the first timesheet during the a meeting. By doing this, any potential hurdles (like overzealous spam boxes) can be identified and overcome.