Skills for Care responds to the Prime Minister's announcement on adult social care workforce reforms

Responding to the Prime Minister's announcement of a new ministerial group to immediately look at wider adult social care workforce reforms beyond the Fair Pay Agreement, Professor Oonagh Smyth CBE, Chief Executive of Skills for Care, said:

"It's excellent to hear Andy Burnham promise to focus on the 1.5 million people working in adult social care straight away. Our people will be the heart and soul of a National Care Service - so we need a shared ambition to lift up these skilled professionals and offer clear career pathways, better progression opportunities and improved integration with health.

"The Prime Minister is absolutely right to recognise that improving pay for care workers needs to go hand in hand with wider workforce reforms. Better pay will help us attract and keep more people with the right skills and values, but it's only by combining it with opportunities to develop and progress that we'll truly be able to make adult social care a rewarding career in every sense.

"The good news is that we already have some strong foundations that can enable these reforms to happen fast. A very important one is the Care Workforce Pathway, which Skills for Care worked with government to develop and is now being expanded and rolled out across the sector. It sets out, for the first time, a clear structure for careers in adult social care, with the knowledge, skills values and behaviours needed - enabling exactly what Andy Burnham's talking about.

"We also have the workforce support infrastructure in place to deliver reforms quickly. With renewed political will, we can use everything we've got to accelerate our efforts to build a workforce that can provide the best possible care for everyone who draws on it."

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