Workforce skills reports

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Background to Workforce Skills Reports

As part of the Sector Skills Council, Skills for Care & Development (SfCD), the SSSC has been involved in analysing supply and demand of skills to the sector since 2007. The first such analysis was the Sector Skills Agreement (SSAg) report begun in 2007 and published 2008. The report was part of a UK-wide analysis of skills needs and demands in the social service sector, and can be found here.

Following the SSAg, Sector Skills Councils were required to produce further reports called Sector Skills Assessments (SSA) and two were published, one in 2010 (available here) and the other in 2012 (available here).

The requirement for Sector Skills Councils to undertake such analyses was dropped following the 2012 SSA. However, the SSSC was keen for elements of the work to be continued so it developed and published two similar analyses called Workforce Skills Reports (WSR), one in January 2013 (available here) and a second in December 2014 (available here).

All of the above reports were produced by the SSSC’s Workforce Intelligence (WI) team. Following restructuring of the WI team in 2014, responsibility for future WSRs was transferred to the SSSC’s Strategic Performance and Engagement Department. The most recent WSR (published in the autumn of 2017) can be found from the link below.

October 2021

Workforce Skills Report 2021

06 Oct 2021

The Workforce Skills Report 2021 looks at the current provision of qualifications for the social work, social care and early years workforce, demand for qualifications and how they meet current skills needs. It also looks at barriers to undertaking qualifications and what new skills are needed for the future.

All workers registered with the SSSC must hold, or be working towards, a qualification suitable for their role. If they don’t already hold one, they are registered with a condition to gain it, usually within five years.

The new report highlights that between 2021 and 2025 more than 68,000 registered workers in care homes for adults, care at home and housing support services need to meet a qualification condition. Most of these are met by the SVQ Social Services and Healthcare (SSH) at SCQF level 6, however based on recent average provision around 25,000 people will be able to start the award over the next four years. This gap between demand and supply is the biggest identified in the report

Workforce Skills Report 2016/2017

12 Dec 2017

The Workforce Skills Report for 2017 is available from the main SSSC website here: Workforce Skills Report 2016-17