Provisional official statistics on the Scottish social service workforce 2019


18 May 2020

Notice: This provisional data was produced during Spring 2020 to assist with COVID planning that was required at that time. It has now been superseded by the Official Statistics publication Scottish Social Service Sector: Report on 2019 Workforce Data. Some data may differ between the publications as further cleaning and verification took place. To avoid confusion, we have disabled the download links below. We will publish an updated version of this data in due course. If you need to access this data as it was please contact us.

The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) today published provisional Official Statistics on the social service workforce.

This is the first occasion that the SSSC has published provisional Official Statistics and we have done this to support planning for registered care services and local authority social work services in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. 

This is in line with advice from Scottish Government to Official Statistics producers to consider ways in which they can support planning. It is also in light of the increased demand we have experienced for data that we hold on those working in the sector. In deciding this and developing the data sets we took advice from the Office of the Chief Statistician in Scottish Government and from key stakeholders in the sector. If we had not taken this step then the data would not be available until after the publication of the main report (the Scottish Social Service Sector: Report on Workforce Data) in August 2020. 

Due to the provisional nature of the data we recommend that comparison with the data from previous years should be made cautiously. The primary purpose is to indicate the number of staff working in different part of the sector to aid planning. The data are from December 2019 and include the following: 

  1. Headcount and WTE data on practising social workers by local authority and type of fieldwork team.
  2. Headcount data from December 2019 on all registered care services at the level of individual service including their postcodes, care service number, type of service and type of employer. That data does not include childminders, child care agencies, nurse agencies.
  3. Headcount of childminders at local authority level.

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