The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) today published Scottish Social Service Sector: Report on 2014 Workforce Data.

This is the seventh workforce data report published by the SSSC and the fourth which is a set of Official Statistics. The report combines administrative data from the Care Inspectorate with data collected by the SSSC directly from local authorities to form a comprehensive picture of the paid workforce employed in the social service sector in Scotland at the end of 2014.

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The SSSC was approved by the Scottish Parliament as an Official Statistics provider in 2012.

The report presents information on the number of people who work in the social service sector and a breakdown of the number of people working in all sub-sectors (ie the different types of social services) and across employer types (public, private, voluntary) within individual local authorities.

Key points

• The size of the workforce has increased to 199,670, an increase of 5.3%. This makes the workforce the largest it has been since these reports began in 2008 and approximately 7.7% of Scottish employment.
• The largest employer type differs between local authorities, with services in the Orkneys, Shetlands and Western Isles (ie the three 'island authorities') being provided mainly by the public sector. However, the majority of areas have the private sector as the largest employer.
• The three largest sub-sectors are housing support/care at home, care homes for adults and day care of children; together, these account for almost 77% of the workforce.
• The median age of the workforce is highest in the public sector (47) and lowest in the private sector (40). Early years workers in the private sector have the lowest median age.
• The percentage of men working in the sector is 15%, though it is more than double this in criminal justice and residential child care services.
• The workforce is predominantly employed on permanent contracts (80%).
• The median figure for the typical weekly hours worked by staff is 32 and 51% of the workforce work full time (more than 30 hours per week). 

A number of new features appear in this report compared to previous years. These are:

• information about the number of people in the workforce per 10,000 of the population in each local authority area
• new contract types were introduced to the survey to identify the number of no guaranteed hours contracts in the sector
• more information and analysis is provided on the breakdown of part time and full time working in the sector
• we’ve introduced a new chapter that gives a more detailed breakdown of the housing support/care at home sub-sector.

As an Official Statistics product, this publication complies with the Pre-Release Access to Official Statistics (Scotland) Order 2008. The list of people who have pre-release access can be found here.

Data Tables and Charts

The tables and charts in this report are available in Microsoft Excel (.xlsx) and OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods) format, plus all the report's data tables in non-proprietary Comma Separated Values (CSV) format. The CSV files are provided together in a compressed ZIP file. The provision of the data in these formats is intended to facilitate its analysis and re-use.

Also available for download is the blank survey template used by local authority social work survey respondents to submit their data for December 2014. The interactive visualisations section of the website has been updated with the 2014 data.

More detailed tables giving a breakdown of the number of people working in all sub-sectors and employer types within individual local authority areas are available here.