Discover how Skills for Care is supporting a skilled, valued and sustainable adult social care workforce through training, career pathways, workforce development and investment in learning.
There are not enough adult social care workers now - and we will need more in the future. Making the sector more attractive to work in is essential, but we also need to better guide and train those who want to start working in adult social care and better support the progression of those who make adult social care their career. Increased investment is always welcome, but this is just as much about an efficient skills system that is clear about how it meets the needs of employers, workers and those who draw on care and support.
What do we want to see?
We want to see a skilled, professional and valued adult social care workforce, capable of meeting increasingly complex current and future care needs within communities. To achieve this, we want:
- a workforce that has the right skills to support the achievement of the shifts from hospital to community, sickness to prevention and analogue to digital – as well as the Government’s growth and opportunity missions
- a holistic career framework with clear entry and progression routes, consistent standards, sustainable funding and accessible, high-quality training
- a system that identifies skills needs, creates and evolves training to meet that need and has the capacity to deliver it at the necessary scale
- the education and training available to align with the needs of employers and people who draw on care and support - encouraging employers to invest and being the cornerstone of high-quality care
- commissioning practices and funding to be aligned with the required skills levels to ensure effective care delivery and integration across systems
- all workers to have opportunities for learning, development, and career progression.
The current situation
A skilled and knowledgeable workforce
The adult social care workforce as a whole is skilled, knowledgeable and values-driven. The workforce’s capability is not currently reflected through formal qualifications, though: 55% of workers (excluding regulated professionals) have no relevant social care qualifications and only 61% of registered managers are qualified at Level 5 or above. Skills for Care data show an ongoing reduction in the proportion of care workers acquiring formal qualifications.
Learning opportunities
The sector has access to a wide range of training, qualifications, apprenticeships and other learning opportunities. Whilst this does provide choice and opportunities to find bespoke, innovative or niche courses, it can also create confusion for employers, learners and commissioners about what skills particular programmes deliver. There is some evidence that employers react to this complex landscape of courses and qualifications by requiring staff to retrain or recertify, even when they already have the necessary knowledge and skills.
A complex system
The design and availability of skills programmes in the sector is influenced by the policies of multiple government departments - most notably the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Department for Education (DfE). Each have their own executive agencies, regulators, funding streams and approaches to quality. This can limit engagement and uptake, particularly from the smaller employers that make up the vast majority of the adult social care provider market (and employ half the workforce).
One example of this is the large decline in the use of apprenticeships within the sector. Our latest analysis shows a 75% drop in the use of apprenticeships in the care sector since 2016/17. The overall system needs to focus on attracting more recruits, training those already working and retaining them in the workforce as they become increasingly productive and valuable.
Evolving needs
The number of people drawing on care and support continues to grow, and people's care and support needs are becoming more complex. This is driving a growing demand for more advanced skills - such as understanding of dementia care, skills to perform delegated healthcare activities, and skills for supporting technology enabled care. These technical skills also place an ongoing demand on the workforce’s underpinning fundamentals; the literacy, numeracy and digital capability to engage with increased record keeping, medicine management, care technology and so on.
Financial constraints
Our workforce intelligence data and wider research show that learning and development are key to improving workforce retention – something the sector urgently needs given persistently high turnover rates. Yet, as budgets become tighter, investment in training is declining, particularly when it is difficult to demonstrate an immediate financial return. Low pay differentials also reduce the incentive for staff to pursue qualifications, and statutory compliance means that employers must prioritise mandatory training over broader development. In addition, because employers often lack confidence in training completed elsewhere, they frequently repeat training unnecessarily, using up limited resources that could be better spent on progression and skills development.
Lack of national development pathways
Until recently, the sector lacked a clear and consistent development pathway, with a complex learning and development landscape struggling to align with the diverse roles in the sector. The introduction of the Care Workforce Pathway offers a major opportunity to tackle many of these workforce challenges but requires the learning and development landscape to evolve in line with the pathway.
Solutions
Commitment to development pathways
The Care Workforce Pathway offers the first universal sector-wide career structure with validity across the diverse adult social care employer base.
Government and Skills for Care should continue to improve the pathway, build its profile, and use it as the golden thread for all workforce development activities - including the Fair Pay Agreement - guiding wider policy and related initiatives. The Pathway must be useful for employers, policymakers, regulators and workers across the sector and these stakeholders need to be a part of its ongoing development. This will ensure consistent, efficient decision-making on skills and training that maximise investment by and in the sector.
The Care Workforce Pathway requires sustained government commitment to develop, maintain and implement it in a flexible and responsive way to ensure the sector can fully align with, and benefit from, its potential. We recognise the government’s ongoing commitment to this.
We, Skills for Care, need to:
- consistently communicate the Pathway and promote it to employers, workers, training providers and other stakeholders;
- keep the Pathway, and the role descriptions within it, under review and up to date; making changes to reflect developments in the occupations and the skills they require.
We'll work with others to:
- integrate the Care Workforce Pathway into the wider skills system
- explore the use of the Pathway in regulatory, quality and commissioning frameworks
- ensure the Pathway reflects the evolving skills needs of the sector.
Creating a coherent system
To make training and progression in adult social care work effectively, the national skills system must be aligned with the needs of our population and the sector. This means ensuring that policy, funding and processes across government support the development of the workforce in a coherent and accessible way.
The Care Workforce Pathway offers a major opportunity to simplify, integrate and strengthen the skills offer for adult social care. But, for the Pathway to succeed, employers, learners and training providers must be able to access it easily through the wider national skills system. That includes ensuring that funding streams - such as 16–19 funding, the Growth and Skills Levy, and the Lifelong Learning Entitlement - enable training on the Pathway to take place.
To achieve this, we need to:
- establish a shared understanding across government of the sector’s skills requirements;
- develop unified approaches and systems so that policy and process encourage upskilling, using single points of access and consistent language;
- align funding and quality assurance processes to support the Pathway and the wider skills needs of adult social care.
Invest in the fundamentals
There is an ongoing need to develop the current and future workforce’s underpinning skills - literacy, numeracy, digital literacy and increasingly, AI - to support care tasks, ongoing learning and career progression. Achieving this requires both financial and operational support for the sector, with learning programmes available and the costs shared between employers, individuals and society, who all benefit.
Quality and accessible development programmes
To increase the skills base of the workforce and to increase the size of the adult social care workforce, training must be high quality and accessible. Both government and employer investment are essential to develop and maintain these opportunities, address skills gaps - such as in dementia and technology enabled care - and provide financial support through funding incentives, especially given limited sector resources.
Quality must ultimately be determined by employers and by the workforce. “Does this training add the skills I need to my workforce, improving the quality of care I can deliver?” and “are these the skills I need to deliver high quality care and progress my career?”.
All skills quality mechanisms, including qualification development and approval, training provider approval and audit must be focused on these questions and enabling employers and workers to answer them positively.
We need to:
- ensure the Growth and Skills Levy can continue to be used by adult social care employers to fund training that is relevant for their workforce through the development of apprenticeship units and the ongoing review of apprenticeships to keep them up to date (Skills for Care, employers, Skills England)
- develop and support the roll out of new T-levels, V-levels and other qualifications, ensuring they meet employer and workforce needs, locating them against the Care Workforce Pathway and clarifying the ‘pre career’ and ‘early career’ landscape (Skills for Care, Employers, DfE, DHSC)
- utilise data and intelligence (ASC-WDS, local insight, ESFA achievement data) to monitor training uptake (Skills for Care, DWP, Skills England)
- use data to demonstrate the return on investment case for commissioner, employer and worker investment in skills development (Skills for Care, Skills England).