Martello Manor Inspires Future Kent Carers

Martello Manor by Boutique Care Homes, situated in Hythe, Kent, has spent a week in September building new connections with the county’s next generation of care professionals.

Over the course of one week, Admissions Manager Jude Coveney made three separate visits to two Kent colleges, as part of their ongoing education outreach effort for the home since it opened in June.

The week began at Ashford College, a new education contact for Martello Manor, where Jude returned for a second visit to deliver a guest speaker talk titled “What Adult Care Looks Like in 2026” to more than 60 Social Care students. The session set out what a career in adult care actually involves today: the standards residents and families expect, and the realities students will meet on day one of the job.

“Trust is everything in this job,” Jude says. “Families are handing us the care of someone they love, and that trust has to be earned every single day. If we want the next generation of care professionals to understand that, we have to be honest with them early, before they’ve made up their minds about what this career is.”

Two students came forward after the talk to ask about volunteering and work experience placements at Martello Manor, a direct response Jude sees as the clearest measure of the visit’s impact.

“Seeing two of them come and ask afterwards, that’s the whole point,” she says. “Those are the people who might be sitting with a family in ten years’ time, helping them make one of the hardest decisions they’ll ever face. If today’s visit helped even one of them take that seriously, it was worth the trip.”

The third visit took Jude to Folkestone College, where she delivered a Dementia Friends awareness session to a group of Social Care students, part of the national Dementia Friends initiative run by Alzheimer’s Society. By the end of the session, 23 students had become new Dementia Friends, equipped with a better understanding of dementia and how to support people living with it, both in a future care career and in their own communities.

For Jude, the two strands of the week, the guest talk and the awareness session, point to the same underlying goal.

“Every family who chooses Martello Manor is trusting us with something enormous,” she says. “The students we met this week are the ones who’ll be building that same trust with families in years to come. Getting that right starts long before anyone puts on a uniform.”

Martello Manor opened its doors in June 2026. Good care is not good enough at Martello Manor: it is life, thriving, built on the same standard Jude spent the week putting in front of a new generation of Kent’s care professionals.