Skills for Care launches ASC-WDS: this is why your data matters
23 November 2021
This week we’ve officially launched our Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS).
As we officially launch the service, we’re celebrating everything that it offers for social care employers, including the ability to manage staff records, keep on top of training needs, and apply for funding. But undoubtedly, one of the most important elements of ASC-WDS is the opportunity it provides to paint a comprehensive picture of the adult social care workforce, and for everyone in our sector to be able to contribute to the development of that insight.
We already have 20,000 social care providers utilising the service and contributing valuable data to help inform our workforce intelligence.
Intelligence gathering has been a key part of our work at Skills for Care for over 15 years now. ASC-WDS is an evolution of our National Minimum Data Set for Social Care (NMDS-SC) which was established in 2005. NMDS-SC evolved from a paper collection to an online service, eventually transforming into the ASC-WDS service we have today.
ASC-WDS first went live as a minimum viable product in 2019. This means that we first introduced the service with just its core functionality, and since then our specialist team have been continuing to add to the service, ready now for its official launch.
Through ASC-WDS, social care employers can provide insight about their workforce including the demographic make-up of their team, vacancy rates, career journeys, qualifications, pay, sickness levels, and more.
The intelligence gained from ASC-WDS helps key sector decision makers understand our large and complex sector.
It tells us that 105,000 staff vacancies are advertised on any given day, the average turnover rate for care workers is 34% and that we’ll need 490,000 more jobs by 2035 to keep up with an aging population.
The data collected in ASC-WDS underpins the development of Skills for Care’s annual ‘State of the adult social care sector and workforce in England’ and ‘Size and structure of the adult social care sector and workforce in England’ reports, which are important resources used by the Government, the Department of Health and Social Care, local authorities and other key sector stakeholders to inform policies, planning and decisions for the sector, including thinking around the impacts of COVID-19, Brexit, and current recruitment challenges.
As we officially launch ASC-WDS we want to say thank you to all those employers who are already using ASC-WDS and contributing their data and insights. We look forward to more employers signing up to the service and allowing us to continue to develop our detailed picture of the sector, and what it needs now and in the future.
As a way of saying thank you, all new and existing ASC-WDS account holders can now access our Benefits Bundle to gain offers across Skills for Care’s products and services, including discounts from our endorsed training providers and 10% off all items in our bookshop and our eLearning modules.