Finding and keeping talent
The adult social care workforce currently comprises more than 1.54 million people working in over 1.67 million different job roles across residential care, support in other forms of purpose-built accommodation, home care and community care settings, including personal assistants.
The sector contributes about £41 billion to the English economy, and effective workforce planning is critical so we can ensure the workforce is skilled, knowledgeable, values-driven and capable of meeting the diverse needs of people in our communities with high-quality care.
The 2006 Director of Adult Social Services (DASS) Guidance sets out expectations around your internal and external responsibilities and gives you some basic questions to answer:
- What is the general stability of the market like? Are there regular closures of providers or contract hand-backs? Or are arrangements quite stable?
- What are the vacancy, sickness and turnover levels across providers like and are they different in the different sub-sectors, e.g. care homes, supported living, home care? Are the actions to address issues effective? If not, what else can the council do to have impact?
- Do you have mechanisms to triangulate different sources of information to gain a meaningful understanding of the local situation? For example, what does it tell you if one home care provider consistently reports a 15% vacancy rate, but is CQC rated ‘good’, is always able to pick up new work and receives regular compliments?
- How are you supporting two-way communication between relevant council teams, e.g. commissioners and with the wider care sector?
- What is your council doing to develop the wider care workforce?
- Do you understand the diversity, equality and inclusion issues relating to the wider care workforce? Issues can be different in different areas – e.g. relating to the female majority in the workforce, or that people from an ethnic minority may be over-represented in low-paid roles.
Skills for Care and ADASS should be able to help you with data and benchmarking information, as well as provide good practice examples.
Many more councils are becoming direct providers of social care services again, as a result of fragility in the care market, which means you could be responsible for a growing group of care workers and other vocationally qualified colleagues as part of a ‘provider services’ arm of your department.
There has been a trend towards international recruitment to address recruitment gaps. Some providers have used this option for a long time, but recently the wider care sector has increased the intensity of overseas recruitment activity for care worker posts.
Your local ADASS region should be able to help you think through your local approach to international recruitment and provide peer support to prepare for such recruitment and to support you/your wider sector when people are recruited.
Some things to consider:
- How will you retain people once they have moved to the UK?
- What support networks exist to welcome new arrivals?
- Where will people live?
- How will they get to work?
- How does the sponsorship system work? How will you respond if providers have their sponsorships revoked?
- How will you respond if you have concerns about exploitation or trafficking?
Good quality training, learning and skills development are often seen as a key to retaining the workforce. Get a sense of what your council offers for directly employed staff and, with your team, think about how you might want to improve it.
Be open to working with your partners (neighbouring councils, the NHS and the wider care sector) to offer a good range of skills development. Some councils have formed care academies to improve training and learning for local staff, and to improve and promote career pathways in care.
Longer term, you may also want to consider if there are opportunities for developing key worker accommodation for social care staff. There is also an important agenda around the role of people with lived experience, in recruitment and training and in pursuing careers in care.
As the 2006 DASS Guidance says, you also have broader responsibilities to the care workforce on your patch. You are not their employer, but you are a key leader locally.
To fulfil these broader responsibilities, consider the following arrangements:
- Have a regular platform for engaging with the sector. Some councils have routine webinar sessions to share learning and good practice. Most have provider forums for regular engagement.
- Have a training/learning offer for the sector. Do you work, for example, with Skills for Care and others to deliver this? If not, what are your priorities for starting and how can you co-produce these with the sector?
- Do you have a local care association or umbrella organisation for providers? If not, what exists elsewhere in your region and can you replicate it, or get help to do so?
- Have additional support offers, such as hands-on quality teams who can help turn around struggling care providers and support their staff. Others may offer important functions to support the front line.
- Do you do any joint recruitment with the wider sector?
- Do you involve the NHS with care sector support and training? If not, can you use any national winter/discharge-related monies to support training and development?
- Since the Covid-19 lockdowns, many more people in social care work in a hybrid way, but remember the majority of care workers (the largest share of the care workforce) work in regulated services and do not have the option of hybrid working, so there is an equity issue. How is this balance managed successfully?