Adult Social Care Workforce Continues To Grow

New analysis from Skills for Care shows the adult social care workforce continues to grow with 1.45 million people now offering care and support in communities and services across England.

Skills for Care’s ‘Size and structure of the adult social care sector and workforce in England 2017’ report reveals that workforce numbers have grown by 19% to approximately 1.58 million job roles since 2009. The rate of increase for adult social care jobs has slowed however. There was an increase of 30,000 jobs between 2014 and 2016 compared with an increase of 70,000 between 2012 and 2014.

There are now around 20,300 organisations involved in offering social care across England and around 70,000 adults, older people and carers who receive direct payments employ their own staff.

The report contains a new projection that if the workforce grows proportionally to the projected number of people aged 65 and over in the population then 500,000 new jobs will be needed by 2030 to meet demand.

Skills for Care CEO Sharon Allen said: “This report is now firmly established as the gold standard for workforce data on the existing workforce and is also projecting significant potential growth to meet demand over the coming years.

“This report allows everyone in adult social care and health services to make decisions about how to meet growing demand in our communities based on hard data not anecdotal evidence. Given we know that we will need to find, train and retain many more people over the next 15 years it shows that this is the time for all of us to focus on how we can do that.”

To download the ‘Size and structure of the adult social care sector and workforce in England 2017’ report go to www.skillsforcare.org.uk/sizeandstructure