The Scottish Social Services Council, as part of the UK wide Skills for Care and Development Alliance was the first organisation to commission research into the economic value of adult social care in Scotland and the UK with the last report published in 2018.

For this most recent project, Skills for Care and Development commissioned Alma Economics to analyse the adult social care sector’s economic and social value in the UK as a whole and in each of the four nations using data from 2022/23.  

It’s used to inform the economic case for investment in the social care sector and its workforce in the UK as a whole (as well as having national breakdowns). It’s also used to inform policy making and national spending review decisions on investment. 

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This Staff vacancies in care services 2023 report is jointly published by the Care Inspectorate and the Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC). This report provides data on vacancies reported by care services as at 31 December 2023. It presents data on the number of registered care services with a vacancy, the number of actual vacancies that services say they had using whole time equivalent (WTE) data, and data on the reasons why services have reported that vacancies are hard to fill.

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This spreadsheet contains information about the Social Services Workforce collected from services regulated by the Care Inspectorate (via its Annual Returns in December) and from the annual December Local Authority Social Work Services Staffing Return in 2023.

We created this spreadsheet to provide you with more detailed information about the workforce than is currently available in the Workforce Data Report. The spreadsheet will allow you to interrogate the data in detail at a local authority area level

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Analysis of registrant equality data report November 2024

The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) today published Analysis of registrant equality data (PDF, 1.0MB) 

This report combines data on fitness to practise, registration conditions and protected characteristics for the first time. This report also has data on religion and sexual orientation. The data is a snapshot as of January 2024.

Information on the differences between SSSC's registration data and the workforce data it receives and publishes can be found here: Differences between registration and workforce data 

Download the report here: Download (PDF, 1.0MB)

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The interactive Social Worker Data Tool allows you to interactively investigate data on practising social workers employed by local authorities. Guidance and background notes are included within the tool.

The latest version of the tool can be downloaded below

Download (XLSX, 485 kb)

If you have any enquiries about these tables, please contact:

Zara Gall
Tel: 01382 723657
Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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This file allows you to interactively investigate the Local Authority Post Types data. The file presents headcount and WTE (whole time equivalent) data of all filled posts in local authority social work services where those employed do not work in a registered care service. This therefore covers staff working primarily in field social work services. The data published includes a breakdown of the numbers of different people and posts across the whole of Scotland as well as by individual local authorities.

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