Why knowing more about the great people who work in care matters

Did you know that there are around 1.6 million dedicated and highly skilled people working in adult social care?

Neither did we, or anyone else for that matter, until we analysed the Adult Social Care Workforce Dataset (ASC-WDS) this year. No one knew how many people worked in adult social care until we started our dataset over a decade ago. Since then, thanks to thousands of employers who contribute their data to us, we have a deep and comprehensive understanding of not only how many people work in care, and we also know key information like what they are paid, their age and gender and how many vacancies we have on any given day.

And every year around this time we publish our Size and Structure of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce report, where our workforce intelligence team crunch the numbers offering a clear picture of what is happening across social care.

You may be asking yourself: ‘why does this report matter?’

It matters because, in a time of reform in social care - and changes in the way services are delivered - knowing what the workforce looks like, where the gaps are, identifying the challenges and where the opportunities lie become more important.

This year’s report tells us that the adult social care workforce in England started growing again in 2022-3, after falling the previous year. At the same time, the vacancy rate decreased to 9.9%, or around 152,000 on any given day, compared with around 164,000 the previous year.

That’s encouraging and shows how hard employers have been working to fill vacant posts in a very competitive employment market, including international recruitment where the new data shows some services have been able to recruit. But the figures also show us that employers are still under intense pressure to find and retain enough people with the right skills to work in care.

The figures support our call for a long-term workforce plan for adult social care. Yes, it’s great that we’ve got one for the NHS, and the next step is for us to have one for social care too. One important thing for a social care workforce plan to cover is terms and conditions of the people working in care as this will help employers to find and keep more people in their local areas – in the face of what we know is tough competition from the likes of supermarkets and distribution centres.

We are ready to help bring this about at Skills for Care, and we’re keen to work with Government, employers, other sector partners and the people who draw on care and support to make it a reality. The report offers solid data that will help decision makers make informed and effective choices about how we tackle the issues employers face now and in the future.

We have a lot of work to do and one thing we need to get much better at is making the case that careers in care are rewarding and challenging. We need to link people to the posts out there that need to be filled by people with the values needed to be a great care worker.

Most of us know someone who is drawing on care and support, so I hope as many people as possible will use our data to make good decisions about the workforce in adult social care. Doing so will help to make sure that the people we care about have the maximum control over their lives, which surely is the whole point of what we all do.

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