31 March 2025

The Workforce Skills Report 2025 looks at the current provision of qualifications for the adult social care, children's residential care and early years workforce, and demand for those qualifications.  It also looks at barriers to undertaking qualifications.

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, within three or five years.

The new report highlights that from 2025 to 2030 just over 40,000 registered workers in adult day care, care homes for adults, care at home and housing support services need to meet a qualification condition. Most of these (around 31,000) are met by the SVQ Social Services and Healthcare SCQF level 6, however based on recent average provision around 20,000 people will be able to start the award over the period 2025 to 2030. This gap between demand and supply is the biggest identified in the report.  It will be partly bridged by HNC Social Services, which is the alternative main award that adult social care support workers can achieve for SSSC registration.

The report is available to download here Download (1.3MB).

You can download the tables from the report in either Microsoft Excel (XSLX), Open Document Spreadsheet (ODS) or Comma-separated values (CSV) format here.

Download WSR Tables and Charts XLSX (0.3MB)

Download WSR Tables and Charts ODS (0.2MB)  

Download WSR Tables and Charts zipped CSV (0.01MB)