With health and social care facing the greatest workforce crisis in history, Craig Wade, sector manager for health, science and social care at the educational charity and leader in vocational and technical learning NCFE, explains how we can begin to plug skills gaps and resuscitate the sector.

The Health and Social Care Select Committee’s report – Workforce: recruitment, training and retention in health and social care – paints a stark and terrifying picture of the challenges faced now and in the future. 

For those already in the sector, nothing in the report came as a surprise. The strain placed on frontline staff is causing them to break. With each failure to recruit and each colleague lost to other industries, the burden becomes heavier still for whoever remains.

Yet despite this, the government has shown a reluctance to intervene. The Workforce Plan promised in the spring has been pushed back until the autumn, and with the turmoil at Number 10 still unfolding, there are no guarantees it won’t be pushed back again. 

This is all taking place under a backdrop of one in three care workers leaving their jobs last year, 6.5 million people already on waiting lists for treatment, and research suggesting the NHS could right now be short of 12,000 hospital doctors and over 50,000 nurses and midwives.

Publicly and politically, much of the focus falls on the NHS. This is of course correct, but what I’m keen to do is raise the profile of social care within our wider health ecosystem. After all, without social care, more strain will inevitably fall back onto an already overstretched NHS.  

The Department of Health and Social Care’s Adult Social Care Workforce Survey, from December last year, showed that over 70% of practitioners felt the number one thing that would help them with recruitment and staffing was better recognition of the sector by the government. 

At the same time, Care England reported that 95% of care providers were struggling to recruit staff, and 75% were struggling to retain their existing staff. This is before you consider that an estimated 490,000 additional jobs are going to be needed in social care by the early part of the next decade. 

So that’s the doom and gloom out of the way. Let’s focus on some of the solutions that can help move social care forwards and make it as rewarding and attractive as possible.

The Select Committee’s report repeats its earlier 

recommendation from 2020 that annual funding for social care ‘should be increased by £7 billion by 2023–24.’ This would, they say, account for ‘demographic changes, uplift staff pay in line with the National Minimum Wage and protect people who face catastrophic social care costs.’

Care workers have more recently benefited from the introduction of the National Living Wage which increased pay from an average of £6.75 an hour in 2012 to £8.50 in 2020. This, however, at a time when the cost of living is so acute, has fallen below the average pay of shopworkers and cleaners and is only available to workers over the age of 23.

Pay is a crucial factor in recruitment and retention no matter what sector you work in – now more than ever. With social care being outbid by retail and hospitality, it’s understandable why potential workers go elsewhere, and existing staff leave the industry. 

Alongside ensuring workers receive a competitive salary, there are other areas where social care can position itself to be a more rewarding long-term option – namely, as the report suggests, around pay progression, professional development, and offering clear career pathways.

If we focus specifically on care homes as an example, the Select Committee’s report states that 75% of care home managers come from within the sector, but report ‘low levels of support and training, as well as poor job satisfaction.’ 

Indeed, Carol Atkinson, Professor of Human Resource Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, suggests that training for managers is ‘often lacking’ and that establishments are run on experience with ‘little wider management development’.

One area that’s of particular interest to me is the introduction of care certificates which would offer portable qualifications. Essentially, they would be transferrable between social care providers and even between social care and the NHS. Alongside standardisation of training, this would, importantly, recognise specialist skills and provide those vital career progression opportunities.

A further area to address is the demographics of the social care workforce. A report produced last year by Skills for Care – The State of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce 2021 – showed that less than a quarter of workers started in the sector when they were under the age of 25. Indeed, the average age for starting work in adult social care is almost 36. 

In 2020, NHS Digital published a report on adult social care in local authorities which found that almost three quarters (73.7%) of workers were over the age of 40 and that just under a third (32%) were 55 and over. Only 2.9% of roles were filled by workers under 24. 

An older workforce that isn’t being bolstered by young talent will only be further squeezed over time. As a sector, we must look at ways we can improve the pipeline of skilled workers by creating attractive, rewarding, and fit-for-purpose options so that learners can and want to enter social care as a career. 

I’m hopeful that the Health and Social Care Select Committee’s report will prove a significant moment for the future of healthcare. However, all too often, we’ve been here before. With social care vacancy rates now back above their pre-pandemic levels, we need tangible solutions and NCFE wants to be at the forefront of providing them. 

Health and social care can no longer be bandaged up. With further inaction, as we’ve seen, it will sadly break for good. Avoiding this is something we can all agree on. 

After a 10-year military career as a registered nurse for the Royal Navy, Wade joined NCFE as the Sector Manager for Health, Science and Social care. He provides a deep understanding of the respective sectors and occupational and labour market trends, advising NCFE on current specialist skills needs and predictions for future development. 

To learn more about NCFE’s involvement with social care visit https://www.ncfe.org.uk/sector-specialisms/social-care/