The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) today published Scottish Social Services Sector: Report on 2013 Workforce Data.

This is the sixth workforce data report published by the SSSC and the third 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 services sector in Scotland at the end of 2013.

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This report provides a detailed overview of the data at a national level and, where possible, also provides data sub-divided by sub-sector or local authority area. The format of the report follows that used in the SSSC’s previous Workforce Data Reports for 2008-2012.

 Key points from the analysis within this report include:

• the size of the workforce appears to have fallen slightly to 189,670 people. This is approximately 7.4% of Scottish employment.
• the largest employer type differs between local authorities, with services in the Orkneys, Shetlands and Western Isles (i.e. 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 76% of the workforce.
• the median age of the workforce is highest in the public sector (47) and lowest in the private sector (41). Early years workers in the private sector have the lowest median age.
• the percentage of men working in the sector has fallen slightly to 15%, though it is more than double this in criminal justice and residential children’s services.
• the workforce is predominantly employed on permanent contracts (79%). The median figure for the typical weekly hours worked by staff is close to full-time at 32.5.

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 2013. The interactive visualisations section of the website has been updated with the 2013 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.