Official Statistics

Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments, England, September 2015

Staff employed directly and indirectly by adult social services departments in England as at September 2015.

Documents

Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments, England September 2015

Details

This report contains information on staff employed directly and indirectly by adult social services departments in England as at September 2015. Directly employed jobs are those recorded by the local authority as permanent, temporary or apprentices (directly employed) in the NMDS-SC. Indirectly employed jobs are those recorded by the local authority as agency, bank / pool, student, volunteer, apprentices (not directly employed) or other in the NMDS-SC. Further details on the definition of directly and indirectly employed job roles are provided in Annex C.

It will be of interest to central government (for policy development, monitoring and workforce planning), local government (for benchmarking), charities, academics and the general public. The report does not include information on staff employed in the independent sector (private and voluntary) or children’s social services departments published separately by the Department for Education).

This report has used data collected by the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care (NMDS-SC) for the past four years (from 2011). The NMDS-SC is managed by Skills for Care (SfC) on behalf of the Department of Health and has been collecting information about social care providers and their staff since early 2006.

Before 2011 the data source used for this report was the Health and Social Care Information Centre’s ‘Personal Social Services Staff of Social Services Departments’ return (SSDS001). Following a user-wide consultation it was decided that the NMDS-SC would replace the SSDS001 from September 2011 as the adult social care workforce data return for councils.

The NMDS-SC data in this report are not directly comparable with data from the SSDS001 because the SSDS001 covered both adults’ and children’s services and this report focuses solely on adults. The adult job classifications are also very different between the two sources. Trends prior to 2011 are therefore not provided in this report.

Published 10 February 2016