Findings reveal the social care workforce vacancy rate has fallen to 9.9 percent

Skills for Care has published its annual State of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in England report and announced plans to develop a new and comprehensive workforce strategy for adult social care.

The report covers the year from April 2022 to March 2023, which saw some improvements in workforce capacity, largely driven by an increase in international recruitment, including more posts being filled, fewer vacancies, and less turnover.

The report also highlights ongoing trends for the sector, including 390,000 people leaving their jobs, with around a third of them leaving the sector altogether.

This year’s report gives new insights into what works when it comes to keeping people working in adult social care. It identifies five factors that are key to retaining staff, which include being paid more than the minimum wage, not being on a zero-hours contract, being able to work full-time, being able to access training, and having a relevant qualification.

Where none of the factors apply, care workers are more than twice as likely to leave their jobs than when all five factors apply – a 48.7 percent turnover rate compared with 20.6 percent.

While this analysis looked at the independent sector, Skills for Care say good quality roles, development, and stability will also be important for people employed by local authorities. These include the 23,500 social workers or 3,800 occupational therapists who work in social care and the broader commissioning workforce, all of whom are an essential part of how social care functions.

Skills for Care CEO, Oonagh Smyth, said: “It’s good to see green shoots for the sector and workforce in our latest report – which is testament to the hard work that’s gone into tackling the recruitment and retention challenges we face. But the challenges haven’t gone away.

“In particular, the fact that 390,000 people left their jobs in 2022/23 and around a third of them left the sector altogether shows that we have a leaky bucket that we urgently need to repair. We can’t simply recruit our way out of our retention challenges. So, we need a comprehensive workforce strategy to ensure we can both attract and keep enough people with the right skills to support everyone who draws on care and support – and all of us who will draw on care and support in the future.”

Other key findings revealed the workforce grew by one percent between April 2022 and March 2023 after shrinking for the first time on record the previous year, and the vacancy rate fell to 9.9 percent, around 152,000 vacancies on any given day, from 10.6 percent the previous year.

Monthly tracking since March suggests that the vacancy rate has continued to fall and in August was 8.4 percent among independent sector care providers. In independent sector care homes, the vacancy rate fell to 5.1 percent in August, which was below pre-pandemic levels of 5.5 percent in 2019/20.

The turnover rate across the sector was 28.3 percent in 2022/23, down slightly from 28.9 percent the previous year. This means around 390,000 people left their jobs. Around a third of them left the sector altogether.

Adult social care added £55.7 billion per annum to the economy in England, up 8.5 percent from 2021/22, which is more than the accommodation and food service industries.

On average, care workers with five years’ or more experience in the sector were paid just six pence, more per hour than care workers with less than one year of experience. For the first time on record, the proportion of men working in the sector increased from 18 percent to 19 percent.

Only eight percent of the workforce was aged under 25, compared with 12 percent of the economically active population.

Between March 2022 and March 2023, an estimated 70,000 people arrived in the UK and started direct care providing roles in the independent sector.

Projections show that 25 percent, 440,000, more posts will be needed by 2035 if the number of adult social care posts grows proportionally to the projected number of people aged 65 and over in the population.

In response to those trends, Skills for Care will be working with a wide range of organisations and people who have a stake in social care to develop a workforce strategy.

The strategy will identify the social care workforce needed over the next 15 years and set out a plan for ensuring the sector has enough of the right people with the right skills. It aims to help employers and commissioners with workforce planning, support the UK Government’s reform agenda, and complement the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan covering the same period, which was published earlier this year.

Oonagh Smyth, added: “To develop the strategy we’ll be using the expertise, data, insights and relationships we have developed over the last 20 years. Given the rich diversity of the sector, any strategy will only be successful if it’s created by the many organisations and people that have a stake in the future of social care, so we’ll be working with a wide range of partners who are willing to embrace and drive the changes we need.

“As always, we are grateful to all the employers who contribute their data to give us a very clear picture of what is happening in our sector, and what needs to happen to fully meet the needs of people who draw on care and support in our communities.”