The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) today published Scottish Social Service Sector: Report on 2024 Workforce Data.

This is the 17th workforce data report published by the SSSC and the 14th 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 2024. 

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This report provides and overview of the data at a national level and divided by sub-sector or local authority area.  The format of the report mainly follows the SSSC's previous workforce data reports for 2008-2023.

Key points

• The Scottish social service workforce increased to its highest level yet (214,750) in 2024.  Largely driven by an increase in staff working in privately run care homes for adults (+1,800 since 2023).
• The care homes for adults workforce is getting bigger.  Their workforce increased in 2024 to 52,400, while the number of services decreased by 24 to 999.
• The day care of children workforce continues to grow, reaching 42,250.  Driven specfically by nurseries and out of school care settings.
• The number of childminding services continues to fall, down to 3,030 active childminders across 2,978 active childminding services.
• The total number of direct care staff increased by 17.4% since 2015, due to growth in two of the largest sub-sectors: housing support/care at home and day care of children.
• The WTE number of staff is 163,790 and the actual number of staff is 214,750 resulting in a ratio of 0.76 which means that on average each employee works 76% of whole-time hours.
• At 41% the private sector continues to have the largest share of the sector's workforce.
• Decreases in public and voluntary housing support/care at home staff is counterbalanced by an increase in the private sector headcount so that housing support/care at home continues to be the largest employer of social care staff, accounting for 36% of the total workforce.
• In 2024, 83% of the sector were employed on permanent contracts and 5% had a no guaranteed hours contract, consistent with 2015 and 2023.
• Just over half of the workforce (54%) is employed full time, though this varies from 11% to 80% by 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 in this spreadsheet: PRA list.

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 2024.

More detailed tables giving a breakdown of the number of people working in all sub-sectors and employer types within individual local authority areas will be published in our detailed data section in the coming months.