Summary

The adult social care workforce skills survey was a voluntary survey conducted by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) and completed by Care Quality Commission (CQC)-registered adult social care residential care and domiciliary care employers through Capacity Tracker. The survey ran for just over a month, from 10 February to 14 March 2025. The survey aimed to investigate:

• employers’ perceptions of skills needs within their organisation and the sector more widely, at the time the survey was conducted
• whether these needs were being met
• the impact of skills gaps on care users, staff and business performance

These questions are currently important evidence gaps. The survey’s aim was to begin to address these gaps and provide evidence to inform local and national planning and policy-making.

The survey received responses from 3,058 adult social care providers, with a higher proportion of responses (60%) coming from domiciliary care providers than residential care (38%) or dual-registered providers (2%). The responses were evenly distributed across regions. The main findings of the survey relate to the following themes:

• whether it was difficult to recruit individuals with the necessary skills to meet the needs of care users in the last 12 months
• the proportion of the current workforce that have the necessary skills to do their job
• skills gaps in the current workforce
• impact of skills gaps
• important factors when promoting care workers to management roles
• barriers to investment in skills development
• the future of skills needs

Main findings include:

• 46% of respondents said that they had found it difficult to recruit individuals with the necessary skills to meet the needs of service users in the last 12 months
• 27% said skills gaps in the workforce had impacted their business performance and growth in the last 12 months
• 48% said there are barriers in the sector that stop investment in skills development
• almost all respondents (97%) said all their staff (74%) or most of their staff (23%) had the necessary skills to do their job, suggesting a high level of confidence in day-to-day competencies

The main limitation of these results is that they are not weighted to be representative of the entire adult social care sector and hence should be viewed as a limited indication of provider sentiment. Furthermore, as a location-level survey of adult social care providers, the findings may differ from those that would have been elicited from a worker-level survey.

Read the full report here.