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National Statistics
Publication, Part of

Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments at 30 September - England, 2011

National statistics
Publication Date:
Geographic Coverage:
England
Geographical Granularity:
Local Authorities, Councils with Adult Social Services Responsibilities (CASSRs)
Date Range:
31 Mar 2011 to 30 Sep 2011

Summary

Error Notification - July 2012
The figure for the number of workers in Gateshead was found, post-publication, to be incorrect. The correct figure was 910 and not 1,820 as previously published. This also had a small impact on national totals quoted in the report. A revised report was issued on 5 July 2012.


This report contains information on staff employed (directly and indirectly) by adult social services departments in England as at September 2011. It will be of interest to central government (for policy development, monitoring and workforce planning), local government (for benchmarking), lobbying organisations, academics and the general public. The report does not include information on staff employed by children's social services departments which is published by the Department for Education .

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

The previous data source used for this report was the Personal Social Services Staff of Social Services Departments return (SSDS001). Following a consultation it was decided that the NMDS-SC would replace the SSDS001 from September 2011 as the adult workforce data return for local authorities.

The data in this report are therefore not directly comparable with data from the SSDS001 because the SSDS001 covered both adults and children's services whereas this report focuses solely on adults and the adult job classifications are very different . Where possible however, some comparisons have been made to previous year's data to provide some context.

Highlights

As at September 2011 there were 160,300 jobs in adult social services departments in England which accounted for 9 per cent of all adult social care jobs.


It is difficult to produce an estimate of changes over time as this is the first time the NMDS-SC has been used as the data source for this report and NMDS-SC coverage of local authorities was low before this change. However, estimates have been produced from two different methods which both provide evidence of a decrease in the total number of adult social services jobs between 2010 and 2011. The estimates from the two methods were 5 and 9 per cent.


As at September 2011 there were 16,300 Social Worker jobs in adult social services departments. Again comparisons over time are difficult but this figure is estimated to be virtually unchanged between 2010 and 2011.


The majority (82 per cent) of adult social services jobs in 2011 were carried out by female workers and 18 per cent were carried out by male workers.
The average age of workers in adult social services jobs in 2011 was 47 years.


The majority (88 per cent) of adult social services jobs in 2011 were carried out by White workers, 12 per cent were carried out by workers from Black and Minority Ethnic groups.

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Last edited: 7 January 2022 5:01 pm