The adult social care workforce in a place is large, diverse and dispersed across many roles, services and organisations. Only seven per cent is directly employed in a council. Here you will find learning to help you to feel more confident and equipped to develop your future workforce for your place.
As the impetus for major positive change in social care grows, so too does the recognition that it cannot be achieved without enabling and equipping the social care workforce to work differently. We need to embed new ways of working that ensure the people who access support can take more control of their lives and live the lives that they want in their own homes and communities.
The adult social care workforce is a key enabler to making that a reality for people. However, the workforce needs to have the conditions to thrive at work, taking care of themselves, as well as promoting the independence and wellbeing of the people they support.
Councils have an important role to play in bringing people together to plan for and develop a workforce that can thrive and work differently to achieve these outcomes for residents.
A new approach to workforce planning
The adult social care workforce in a place is large, diverse and dispersed across many roles, services and organisations. Only seven per cent of the social care workforce is directly employed in a council, 79 per cent are employed by independent providers, seven per cent are employed within the NHS and around eight per cent are employed by direct payment recipients.
There is a growing recognition across councils that to be effective in planning for and developing our adult social care workforce for the future, we need to include the whole workforce in a place. This is a relatively new way of thinking about workforce planning in adult social care and there can be a lack of understanding, experience and confidence in how to do that.
We often hear that people feel overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the task. The skills and competencies needed to plan for a network of inter-dependent organisations within a place are different to those needed for a traditional single organisational approach. Creating spaces for people to come together to discuss what workforce change is needed and how to achieve it can feel difficult.
We support councils to lead and facilitate the development of workforce planning in a place. In the workforce planning hub we will share the learning – as well as learning from outside of the sector – to help you to feel more confident and equipped to develop your future workforce for your place.
In this briefing you will find:
a strategic workforce planning framework to support those who do not yet have a workforce plan for a place, or those who wish to revisit their workforce plan
a section on understanding the workforce implications of key strategies to ensure greater alignment
a section on understanding workforce data and intelligence in adult social care to inform workforce strategies.
Further resources and tools will be added to the Workforce planning hub over the coming months. If you wish to support us in the co-development of these resources or suggest what other resources are needed, please contact us at [email protected].
Strategic workforce planning framework
Workforce planning in a place is a relatively new approach for many councils. As such, we are still learning what good looks like. Through the support we provide to councils we see many different approaches and examples of workforce plans. One size does not fit all.
The strategic workforce planning framework draws on the best of what we see as well as learning from outside of adult social care. It is not intended to be prescriptive, but rather to help you to think about what you will want to include within your workforce plan.
We encourage you to be selective in what you include, the reality is that if it is too long or too detailed, people will not read it or use it to drive change. Your plan should contain enough detail to enable people to understand where you are trying to get to and why, where you are now, and the priorities that will enable you to achieve the changes you are aspiring to. You may want to supplement it with a more detailed implementation plan.
We have a range of other tools on our portal that will help you navigate the steps to develop your plan. There are links to these tools in the framework.
Strategic framework for XXX place
What to include in your plan and why:
A short summary that sets out:
why you have developed a place-based plan
what you are aiming to achieve through your plan and over what period
who will be impacted by your plan?
what is your call to action, in other words, what do you want people to do as a result of having been involved in developing or reading your plan.
Why: Your workforce plan is your vehicle for delivering the workforce change needed to achieve your aspirations for adult social care.
Great care is dependent on people in different roles, services and organisations working together and having shared goals. Too narrow a focus to your plan will not enable you to achieve your ambitions, too broad a focus may be unachievable in the timescale.
You want people to feel engaged, energised and motivated to act because of what is in your plan.
This should include:
how have you developed your plan
who was involved, in other words, think organisations, services and types of roles
how did you involve your workforce in developing your plan.
Why: When we see our voice represented in plans, we are more likely to do something different as a result. It is not realistic to involve all our workforce, but if people know that the plan has been developed with “people like them” and they can see their ideas and experiences reflected, they will have more confidence that the plan is relevant to them.
When planning for the adult social care workforce at a place level, it is important to bring a mix of people from different organisations and services together to develop a rich understanding of the workforce and people receiving support.
When we bring diverse voices, ideas and perspectives together, we get a collective uplift in intelligence and ideas.
Where are you trying to get to? Describe your five to 10 year vision and the implications for the workforce:
Can you describe what will be different in adult social care in your place in five to 10 years
What are they main changes that will enable you to achieve your ambition, for example, promoting independence, utilising technology?
What are the workforce implications of these changesm for example, will people need to work differently, develop new skills and/or build new relationships?
What do you want your workforce to experience when they are working in adult social care in your place?
Why: We need to be able to describe the workforce implications of our key strategies in order to plan and develop our future workforce.
The section of this briefing on understanding the workforce implications of key strategies helps you to think about how to do this.
Without taking time to consider this, we may focus on the wrong priorities and may focus on sustaining what we have, rather than affecting the changes we need.
Workforce experience has the biggest impact on performance at work and the decisions that are made about where we work and how. The highest performing teams are engaged, motivated, enabled, empowered and happy. They are also resilient and adaptable to change.
Setting out how you will collectively achieve this across your adult social care workforce is an important part of your strategy for developing your future workforce
Who is the workforce covered by your plan
What organisations do they work in?
What roles do they do?
Why: The scope of your plan will be impacted by your strategic intent. Through developing a shared understanding of where you are trying to get to, and the workforce implications, you will be able to be clear about which staff the plan is for. This matters because it impacts on who you work with to develop and implement the plan and how relevant your workforce feels the plan is to them.
What does your data tell you about your current adult social care workforce in your place? The section of this briefing on understanding data and intelligence helps you to think about the range of information you can draw on.
What is the current experience of people working in adult social care in your place?
What are your strengths, areas of development, opportunities and risks?
Why: By enabling people to understand about your workforce now, it helps us to understand the distance to travel, the strengths that will be built on and where attention will be focussed to affect change for and with your workforce.
Provide a short overview of the evidence, research or learning you have drawn on to help to shape the plan. (FUTURE RESOURCE TO BE DEVELOPED)
What learning from other councils have you considered or implemented?
Why: If we want different results, we need to do things differently. Learning from others and drawing on evidence and research from within adult social care and from other sectors will help to stimulate thinking about how you could do things differently.
By giving a brief overview of how evidence, research and learning from others has helped to shape your thinking, it will help people to understand the change and will build confidence in that change.
What are the small number (c5) of big priorities that you will focus on to achieve the changes you have described?
Give an overview of each of them:
What is the priority?
Why?
What will be different because of the focus on this priority?
What will you do? (keep this high level, the detail will be in your implementation plan)
Why: Your workforce plan should capture the small number of big priorities that will deliver the changes you need. Agreeing a small number of big priorities will bring clarity and will help to keep everyone on track.
It is unlikely that the priorities will change over the period of the plan, however the detail of what you focus on to deliver against each priority may, and you may want to capture this in an implementation plan.
If you spread yourself too thinly, you may not be able to give the priorities that will make the biggest difference enough focus, capacity or resource.
How will you know you are making a difference?
Describe the results you expect to see in implementing your strategy and how you will know. It is likely you will measure this through a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures.
Describe how you will monitor progress and how you will ensure you capture and share the learning that emerges as you implement your strategy.
Be clear about how and when you will monitor and refresh your strategy and supporting implementation plan.
Why: Your workforce plan should be a living document that guides activity. You will want to assure yourself that you are making progress towards your priorities and that the actions you are taking are having the impact you hoped they would.
As you implement your actions, learning will emerge that you’ll want to reflect on and consider the implications of.
Having a clear and shared understanding of the impact you are looking to achieve and how you will monitor this will help you to do this.
Regular review periods will enable you to reflect, learn, review and refocus capacity and resource to ensure continued progress is made.
Understanding the workforce implications of key strategies
Strategic workforce planning enables us to step back and look forward to understand the workforce we will need in the future and how to develop it. There are often lots of different strategies that exist within a place that have implications for our workforce.
We need to take the time to understand what they are and describe them for our workforce in order for people working in adult social care to see the direction of travel, what it means for them and what change they need to affect.
If we do not align our workforce plan to these other strategies it creates a risk that we focus on the wrong things which don’t have the impact we need to deliver our strategies.
What strategies should we consider?
This will vary from place to place depending on what has been developed. The list below sets out a range of relevant strategies that could exist where you are and that you would seek to consider in the development of your adult social care workforce plan:
Adults social care strategy – sets out the future aspirations and challenges for adult social care and long-term plans for how people will be supported.
Commissioning strategy – sets out the commitments made by the council and its partners to supporting people to live and age well. Commissioning strategies are usually informed by people who live in the area and providers who are commissioned by the council to provide care and support.
Market position statements – market position statements set out the supply and demand of services for particular cohorts of people. They help to signal business development and transformation opportunities. They are regularly refreshed so are a good source of information.
Transformation plans – councils often have transformation programmes for adult social care that affect workforce change. They set out changes to delivery models, processes and ways of working.
Place based strategy or community strategy – helps you to understand the demographics, strengths, challenges, aspirations and priorities for the local population.
Council corporate people strategy – this is the long-term plan for people employed by the council and helps you to understand the workforce profile and priorities for the directly employed workforce. While it’s important to ensure synergy for the adult social care workforce employed within the council, it’s also important to remember that your adult social care workforce strategy is for the whole workforce – employed independently as well as is the council – and to create space to develop a new strategy that involves and includes providers.
Integrated Care Partnership strategy and workforce plan – sets out the place-based ambitions for improving people’s health and the implications for the health and social care workforce.
Care Quality Commission (CQC) reports relating to local provider organisations – in adult social care, people and performance or quality usually go hand in hand. Positive CQC reports can help to identify providers with great employment practices that it can be helpful to learn from.
Who should be involved?
You will want to understand the implications of your key strategies from the perspective of different people working in different roles and organisations across social care. From care staff to commissioners, assessment staff, social workers, occupational therapists, people working at your front door, people working in hospitals, managers, leaders.
These people could be employed within the council, in private, independent or voluntary sector provider organisations, in the NHS or directly employed by people accessing care. To really understand what change means for your workforce, think about who can understand the impact of these strategies from this wide range of perspectives.
What are we trying to understand and describe?
It is very likely that achieving what is set out in your key strategies will require change for your workforce. This could mean lots of things, you may need:
your workforce to develop new skills
people to work differently
new roles to be developed
changes to the culture that drives certain behaviours
a workforce that is more representative of the people being supported
people to build new relationships with people working in other services or organisations
different quantities of existing roles.
If you don’t collectively understand this, how can you plan for it? And if you can’t describe it, how will people to be able to get involved and contribute to delivering the changes that are needed?
A clear statement of intent that sets out what you are working towards – you might call this your workforce vision, your statement of intent or your future workforce – gives you a clear frame of reference that you can keep checking back against as you develop your plan.
For each priority or action, you can consider, how is this helping to achieve our workforce vision?"
How should we develop our workforce vision?
You mind find it helpful to organise a workshop to bring people together to take time and space to think through what the workforce implications of your workforce strategies are. The strength of doing this together is that people bounce off each other’s ideas and perspectives, generating a potentially richer and more aspirational picture.
Through our direct support to councils, we often find this type of workshop to be a powerful way of shifting thinking. People will often begin their workforce planning journey with a clear view about which parts of the workforce it should apply to, or what sort of activity it should focus on. With time and space to consider the workforce implications of the key strategies, they will often re-frame this in recognition of the scale of change needed.
This matters because they have an important role to play in developing and implementing the strategy. If they have been part of the early thinking and decision making, they are more likely to feel invested in ensuring the strategy is successful.
Understanding workforce data and intelligence
Getting started
It’s important to look at the available workforce data to be able to understand your local adult social care workforce. This will help to inform your priorities for improvement.
Collaborating with colleagues and partners to make sense of the workforce data and intelligence helps to facilitate a collective agreement on the priorities for improvement.
This is a practical guide to help you to understand what data is available, how to access it, how to make sense of it and what other sources of information will help you to develop a good understanding of your adult social care workforce at a place level as part of your workforce planning approach.
Workforce data types and sources
Place-based workforce data available to all councils
Skills for Care publish a range of workforce data on their Workforce Intelligence Hub 'My local area.'
You can filter this in several ways to meet your data needs. For example you can search for data by place, by sector or by type of role. You can also see how your place compares to others in your region or nationally. The data is refreshed and updated annually. You can supplement the data with local data and intelligence when available.
As a guide, you may want to collate from the Skills for Care Workforce Intelligence Hub the following core workforce data set to give you an overview of the local adult social care workforce.
Total FTE working in adult social care
FTE (headcount) and % by sector and type of provision
Turnover rate – number of FTE and %
Vacancy rate – total number of vacancies and %
Total number of leavers per annum
Number of posts to be recruited to per annum
Proportion of people employed from within the sector (an indicator of churn)
Average cost of recruitment per year calculated by multiplying the number of posts to be recruited to by £3642 (Skills for Care worked with providers to estimate the average cost of replacing an employee)
Proportion of staff who are full time/part time
Demographic profiling of your workforce
Comparative data within your region and neighbouring local authorities
National comparator data
Other data sources
There may be additional workforce data, intelligence, and insight that you can draw on locally. Availability varies from place to place so these are suggestions to help you to explore what is available in your place:
Talk to commissioners who may have data about people employed by independent providers. They may also have useful data secured through engagement or consultation with provider organisations or service users.
It’s important to understand about the experiences of the adult social care workforce in your place. This will of course vary across organisations. See what has been identified through staff surveys, staff forums, drop in sessions, team meetings etc. Consider organising listening events or go and talk to staff in their place of work.
Human resources and organisational development (HROD) teams usually hold detailed information about the workforce employed within the council – this could be workforce data and analysis and/or results from staff surveys.
Who needs to help us make sense of the data?
In making sense of a complex set of information to inform the development of the strategy for your future workforce it is helpful to draw on a range of perspectives. This will help to understand the nuances across different services and organisations.
Facilitated workshops, that bring people together to review and make sense of the available data and to contribute their own knowledge, understanding and perspectives can be helpful.
Participants could include:
front line staff
senior managers
operational managers
commissioners
transformation colleagues
HR and OD leads
provider organisations
system partners
What are you trying to understand?
There are many things you may want to understand about your workforce so that you can develop a place-based collaborative workforce strategy for adult social care. It will be important for you to be clear about the questions you are seeking to answer.
This may include:
how many people are employed in adult social care in my place
what can we learn from looking at data about workforce supply, recruitment, vacancies and retention
what level of supply and recruitment do we need to plan for
to what extent do we need to grow our workforce over the coming years
how will the workforce need to change to reflect the changing population
what is going well that we can build on
what are our biggest challenges
what are the experiences of our workforce currently, what should we build on, what should we change
what is going to help us to attract and retain our workforce
to what extent do we have the right people in the right types of roles doing the things that will make the biggest difference
should we be considering different types of roles, different ways of doing things, strengthening relationships?
When you have a collective understanding of the workforce, the challenges and opportunities and the implications for the workforce, you can start to consider what different ways of working will enable you to build the workforce you need for the future.