Report: Adult Social Services Staff – Local Authority Departments – England 2018
This report contains information on 112,200 jobs for people employed (directly and indirectly) by local authority adult social services departments in England as at September 2018.
The report will be of interest to central government (for policy development, monitoring and workforce planning), local government (for benchmarking), charities, academics and the general public. The report does not include information on staff employed in the independent sector (private and voluntary) or children’s social services departments (published separately by the Department for Education).
This report has used data collected by the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care (NMDS-SC) for the past seven years (from 2011). The NMDS-SC is managed by Skills for Care (SfC) on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and has been collecting information about social care providers and their staff since early 2006.
Key facts
• As at September 2018 there were 112,200 adult social services jobs in local authorities in England (held by 108,300 people), up 2.7% or 3,000 jobs from 2017. This is the first year on year increase since reporting began from NMDS-SC in 2011.
• The most frequently cited reasons for the 90 local authorities which saw increases between 2017 and 2018 were recruitment or filling vacancies (34.4%), restructure (27.8%), increase in agency or casual staff and insourcing (27.8%).
• Nearly half of all local authority job roles (52,800 jobs or 47.0%) were in direct care providing roles.
• Between 2011 and 2018 there has been a decrease of 29.6% or 47,100 local authority jobs (or around 6,700 jobs each year on average).
• The Professional job group, which includes Social Workers and Occupational Therapists has remained relatively stable and is the only job role group to have increased since 2011, up 700 jobs.
• In 2018 an estimated 3.4 million hours per week were worked by 108,300 adult social care staff within local authorities, up 100,000 hours per week since 2017.
• The average age of adult social care staff in local authorities is 47. This is five years older when compared to the latest available equivalent for the independent sector (Skills for Care, 2018) and NHS workforce average age.
• 42.9% of directly employed staff had zero sick days in the year. On average, the mean number of sickness days for staff in local authorities is 10.3 days, up 0.5 days since 2017 and 6 days more than the UK employment average.
