Proportion of care workers with basic qualifications hits new low following training cuts, shows report

The share of care workers in England with a basic qualification has hit a new low, following government cuts to planned training funding, the annual stocktake of the workforce has revealed.

The proportion of care and support workers with a level 2 qualification (equivalent to a good GCSE) in 2024-25 fell to 38%, down from 41% in 2023-24, said Skills for Care's latest state of the adult social care sector and workforce report.

The fall coincides with a £115m cut to planned spending on sector training in 2024-25 - some of which had been earmarked to put staff through level 2 qualifications - which the Labour government made last July upon taking office.

The reduction in qualification levels also came despite Skills for Care's report finding that receiving training and having a relevant social care qualification were two of five factors which, when present, were associated with significantly improved staff retention.

As reported previously, the sector vacancy rate fell to pre-Covid levels, while the number of staff working in adult social care reached a new high, in 2024-25.

However, these trends continued to be driven by international recruitment, which, having declined over the past year, is set to fall further, following the government's ban on employers hiring overseas staff on skilled worker visas from July 2025.

Labour's £115m cut to adult social care training 

The adult social care workforce strategy, produced last July by Skills for Care and other sector bodies, called on the government to ensure that 80% of direct care staff had a level 2 qualification - equivalent to a good GCSE - within five years.

At the time, an adult social care training and development fund had been set up by the outgoing Conservative government to subsidise staff training, including £53.9m in 2024-25 to support up to 37,000 direct care staff complete a new level 2 adult social care certificate.

However, just days after the strategy was published, the incoming Labour government scrapped the fund, as part of measures to fill an alleged black hole in the 2024-25 public finances left by the Tories.  It was later revealed that the government had cut £115m from adult social care training and development funding for 2024-25.

Labour replaced the Conservatives' fund with its own learning and development support scheme, which also enables employers to recover the costs of putting staff through specific courses, including the level 2 care certificate. However, this was worth just £12m in 2024-25, less than a quarter of what the Tories had allocated for putting staff through the level 2 care certificate alone.

Reduction in qualification levels

The data from Skills for Care's annual report was taken from independent providers between April 2024 and March 2025 and from local authorities in September, meaning at least some of the information was submitted after Labour's cuts to training funding were made.

It showed that, in 2024-25, the proportion of care and support workers with a level 2 qualification or above fell to 38%, down from 41% in 2023-24 and 48% in 2018-19.

Of direct care staff as a whole, 54% did not have a relevant social care qualification, compared with 51% in 2023-24.

There was some progress in the proportion of staff who had completed the care certificate standards - which are separate to the level 2 care certificate and define expected knowledge and skills required of new staff following induction - with this rising from 39% to 42% from 2023-24 to 2024-25.

Meanwhile, the proportion of registered managers with at least level 5 qualification - the expected level for that role, though not a requirement - remained constant year on year, at 61%.

Link between qualification levels and retention

Analysis of turnover rates by Skills for Care found that, of care workers who held a relevant social care qualification, 21% left their job within the 12-month period, compared to 27.2% of those who did not hold a relevant qualification, with a similar trend evident for care workers who had undertaken a higher number of training courses

These were two of five factors - the others being paid no more than 30% below the local authority average, not being on a zero hours contract and working full-time - which, when combined, resulted in a turnover rate of 14.4% for staff concerned. By contrast, those with none of the five factors were three times as likely to leave their jobs in 2024-25, with a turnover rate of 42.2%.

Skills for Care's analysis also showed that care worker retention was linked to age, experience, ethnicity and whether the person was recruited internationally:

• Those aged under 25 were more likely to leave (38%) than older staff, with the lowest rate being among those aged 50-59 (20.3%).
• Staff with less than a year's experience had a turnover rate of 34%, compared with 15.3% for those with 20 or more years' experience.
• Those recruited internationally were less likely to leave (25.9%) than those recruited domestically (38.9%).
• Staff of Asian or Asian British ethnicity were least likely to leave (19.2%), with the highest rates being among black African, Caribbean or British (26.5%) and white (26.2%) workers.

Falling turnover and vacancy levels

Overall, turnover continued to fall, reaching 23.7% across the local authority and independent sectors, down from 24.8% in 2023-24 and a high of 31.4% in 2019-20. However, rates continued to vary by job role, with a 14.1% rate for senior care workers, 16.8% for personal assistants and 17% for registered managers, compared with 29.7% for care workers and 32.8% for registered nurses.

Vacancy rates also continued their year-on-year fall since the record high they reached in 2021-22 (10.5%), dropping to 7% in 2024-25, from 8.3% in 2023-24, leaving 111,000 vacant in the sector. The staff shortage rate remained far higher than in the UK economy as a whole, which was 2.4%, according to the Office for National Statistics.

At the same time, the number of filled posts continued to grow, reaching a high of 1.6m in 2024-25, a rise of 52,000 on the year before.

Overseas staff continued to drive recruitment 

As in 2023-24, the rise was driven by international recruitment, with the number of posts filled by staff of a non-EU nationality rising from 295,000 to 375,000 in the year to March 2025, the fifth consecutive annual rise and three times the level seen in 2021-22.

By contrast, the number of staff of British nationality working in the sector fell by 30,000 in 2024-25, to 1.13m, 85,000 below the number employed in 2021.

However, the number of staff recruited from overseas into direct care roles in the independent sector fell by more than a half in 2024-25, to 50,000, down from 105,000 in 2023-24. This was on the back of a tightening of immigration policy in March 2024, under which staff arriving on health and care worker visas to work in the sector were prevented from bringing dependants with them and the salary threshold at which they could be employed was increased.

The government further tightened policy in March 2025, requiring employers to prioritise hiring international staff already in the country who had lost their sponsorship before seeking to recruit from overseas.

Skills for Care found that, in the subsequent three months (April to June 2025), the number of staff recruited into direct care roles from overseas fell to 7,500, compared with a quarterly average of 12,000 in 2024-25.

Ban on recruiting from abroad on skilled worker visa

At the same time, the government announced a ban on employers recruiting care workers and senior care workers from abroad on health and care worker visas, with the policy coming into force in July 2025.

Providers may extend the visas of staff already in post, who will be able to remain until they can qualify to settle in the UK. Employers will also be able to recruit from staff on the visa who have lost sponsorship and, up to 2028, hire people who have come to the UK through other immigration routes by helping them switch to health and care worker visas.

The government has estimated that the measures will reduce immigration into the UK by 7,000 a year and Skills for Care acknowledged that international recruitment into the sector would likely fall in future, as a result of the changes.

Low level of care staff benefits

For the first time, the report shared data on the provision of sick pay and employer pension contributions for staff in the sector.

By law, employers must contribute 3% of salary into a staff member's workplace pension. Of 5,500 independent sector establishments that provided data on this, just 30% offered staff more than the minimum level, compared with 99% of local authority respondents.

It was a similar story in relation to sick pay, with 26% of independent sector organisations - though 91% of councils - reporting that they paid staff no more than the statutory minimum, echoing recent findings from a survey by the Homecare Association.

Under statutory sick pay (SSP), employers pay staff £118.75 per week from the fourth day of their absence for up to 28 weeks, so long as they earn at least £125 per week. The current Employment Rights Bill will make SSP payable from day one and remove the lower earnings limit, and the Homecare Association has warned that providers would face significant extra costs from this that were currently unfunded.

Pay continues to rise but little reward for experience

The bill will also set up an Adult Social Care Negotiating Body, with equal representation from unions and employers, to produce annual fair pay agreements covering terms and conditions for staff in the sector. The government will provide councils with £500m to finance the first such agreement, in 2028-29, though this has been widely criticised as inadequate.

In recent years, pay at the bottom end in adult social care has been driven up by the national living wage (NLW) - the salary floor, now worth £12.21 an hour, payable to employees aged 21 and over. The latest Skills for Care sector report covered the period during which the NLW was £11.44 an hour, having increased from £10.42 on 1 April 2024, a rise of 9.8%.

It found that the median average wage for independent sector care workers rose by 9.1% (or 6.3% in real terms), in the year to March 2025, from £11 to £12 an hour.

However, there continued to be little reward for experience in the sector, with independent sector care workers with five years' experience earning only 7p more per hour than those with less than a year's experience.

By contrast, healthcare assistants in the NHS with two years' experience at band 3 on the Agenda for Change scale earn 82p more per hour than those with no experience at all.

Sector 'must be realistic about challenges'

In her foreword to the report, Skills for Care chief executive Oonagh Smyth said: "It’s unquestionably a good thing that our workforce is continuing to grow, with vacancy and turnover rates continuing to fall.

"But, with international recruitment still driving these improvements, a declining number of British nationals in the workforce – with no obvious drivers of new domestic recruitment – and falling qualification levels at a time when care roles are becoming more complex, we need to be realistic about the challenges we still face."

A Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) spokesperson said the improvements in retention evident in the report were welcome, adding that the government's latest increase in the NLW had put "money in the pockets of some of the most deserving people in our society: care workers".

They added that the first fair pay agreement for adult social care would "further improve the terms, conditions, and pay of care workers, and...help them stay and progress in the social care sector".