This report contains information on staff employed (directly and indirectly) by adult social services departments in England as at 30 September each year. 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.