The state of the adult social care sector and workforce in England – October 2020

Summary by Care England Policy Team. |

Skills for Care published their annual report ‘The state of the adult social care sector and workforce in England’ on 21 October 2020. Skills for Care help provide the practical tools and support to help adult social care organisations in England to recruit, retain, develop, and lead their workforce.

Summary by Care England Policy Team

Skills for Care published their annual report ‘The state of the adult social care sector and workforce in England’ on 21 October 2020. Skills for Care help provide the practical tools and support to help adult social care organisations in England to recruit, retain, develop, and lead their workforce.

This report uses the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS) which is an online data collection service which gathers information about the adult social care workforce in England. The ASC-WDS data used for the 2019/20 period was collected over the course of the year (April 2019 to March 2020), thus this report does not show how COVID-19 has impacted the adult social care workforce. Rather it should be used as a baseline to reflect the composition of the workforce prior to COVID-19 and to give context to any further research or data collected after March 2020.

The key findings include:

• In 2019/20, adult social care was comprised of around 18,200 organisations across 38,000 care-providing locations. The number of people working in adult social care was estimated at 1.52 million in 2019/20; more than in the NHS (1.4 million people).
• The adult social care sector was estimated to contribute ¬£41.2 billion per annum to the economy in England.
• The number of adult social care jobs increased by 9% since 2012/13 (by 130,000 jobs).
• Around a quarter of the workforce were recorded as being employed on a zero-hours contract (24%, or 375,000 jobs). Domiciliary care services had the highest proportion of workers employed on zero-hours contracts (42%), especially among care workers (56%).
• The staff turnover rate of directly employed staff working in the adult social care sector was 30.4% in 2019/20. This equates to approximately 430,000 people leaving their jobs over the course of the year. However, most of these leavers don’t leave the sector. Around 67% of jobs were recruited from other roles within the sector.
• There was an average of 4.7 sickness days taken annually per worker in 2019/2020. This equated to approximately 6.72 million days of work lost.
• We estimate that 7.3% of roles in adult social care were vacant at any one time in 2019/20, equivalent to 112,000 vacancies.
• The adult social care workforce comprised of 82% workers identifying as female.
• The age distribution of the adult social care workforce was older than the economically active population (27% of adult social care workers were aged 55 and over compared to 20% of the economically active population).
• Around 21% of workers identified as being of an ethnicity that was black, Asian, mixed, or minority ethnic (BAME).
• Around 84% of the adult social care workforce were British, 7% (113,000 jobs) were of an EU nationality and 9% (134,000 jobs) were of a non-EU nationality.
• Since the introduction of the mandatory National Living Wage (NLW) care worker pay in the independent sector has increased at a higher rate than previous years. Care worker real term median pay has increased by 12% since September 2012.

To read the full report, please click here.