The Care Workforce Pathway is a welcome step forward, but a career framework alone will not solve social care’s workforce challenges. Karolina Gerlich, Chief Executive of The Care Workers’ Charity, argues that progression must be matched by fair pay, recognition and wellbeing if it is to mean anything to care workers.
Care work is one of the most skilled, demanding and quietly extraordinary jobs there is. It calls for patience, judgement and real expertise. And it shapes people’s lives in ways few other professions ever do. That is where any honest conversation about careers in care has to begin. The Care Workforce Pathway, developed by the Department of Health and Social Care with Skills for Care, is a genuine attempt to map what those careers can look like across the sector’s different roles. It is a welcome start. But it is only a start, and it has real ground to make up before it matches the reality of the work or properly rewards the people doing it.
A framework, however well drawn, is only a map. So the questions care workers keep asking are fair ones: we have built the pathways, but where do they actually lead, and why would anyone want to climb them if what waits at the top looks so much like the bottom?
Our 2025 Impact Report offers an answer. Drawn from the voices of more than 2,000 care workers, it describes a workforce that is deeply committed and quietly struggling. 87 percent told us they feel they make a real difference to the people they support. At the same time, 72 percent do not feel financially secure, 81 percent have been hit directly by the cost-of-living crisis, and almost 25 percent have used a food bank. These are not people on the margins of the workforce. They are the workforce, and this is a problem felt keenly by all.
There is a lot to be proud of here. More people are finding their way into care, drawn to work that genuinely matters, and the sector is right to celebrate that. Routes in are slowly becoming clearer and more welcoming. The difficulty is what happens next. The pathway sits on top of a pay structure that has not moved with it. You can map progression in as much detail as you like, but if moving up a level brings more responsibility and barely any more money, the route stops being a route and becomes a risk of additional responsibility without reward. And the gap really is that small. Skills for Care’s own figures show a care worker with five years behind them earning, on average, barely 5 pence an hour more than someone who started last week. You cannot ask people to train, specialise and shoulder more for a difference they would struggle to find in their pay packet. Routes up, the ones that genuinely change someone’s life, remain blocked by the problem that has shadowed this sector for decades: pay that does not reflect the skill.
There is another issue tangled up in this. Too often, the only recognised way to progress is to step away from care itself and into administration or management. That suits some people. But many of our most experienced care workers want to grow as practitioners, to become subject experts in dementia, in complex needs, in end-of-life care, without leaving the work they love or the people they know. A pathway worth the name has to reward depth of practice, not just movement into an office.
The risk, if we get this wrong, is that we keep asking care workers to take on more while offering them less. The same report found that 42 percent have felt unhappy or depressed, and over a third say the job is harming their mental health. You cannot build a career on that foundation, and you certainly cannot retain people on it. We talk constantly about recruitment, about the hundreds of thousands of posts the sector will need in the years ahead. You do not fix a leaking bucket by pouring in more water. Retention has to come first, and it rests on whether the work pays, sustains and respects the person doing it.
None of this is unsolvable. The Fair Pay Agreement, now moving forward through the Employment Rights Act, is the most viable attempt in a generation to set pay and conditions across the sector. If it is funded properly and shaped with care workers rather than around them, it could give the Care Workforce Pathway the thing it currently lacks: real pay differentials that make progression mean something. Pay differentials that are attractive for progression and not simply 5 pence more. For that to happen, the pathway cannot remain a voluntary aspiration adopted by the best providers while everyone else carries on as before. It needs to be statutory, adaptable to the realities of different services, and far quicker to implement than it has been so far. Every care worker deserves the opportunity it promises, not only those who happen to work for a good employer.
We have had these conversations before. The round tables a couple of years ago, the work towards a National Care Service, all pointed the same way. What is missing is not insight but follow-through. A genuine national career structure, recognised in both title and pay, is also how we make care a real choice for younger people deciding where to spend their working lives. They will not choose a sector that offers a ladder with no rungs. And this is where it stops being a policy debate. The people who care for our most vulnerable are not a political question to be passed back and forth between governments and budgets. When we fail to build sustainable careers in care, the cost falls on the people who depend on a stable, skilled and committed workforce being there tomorrow as surely as it is today.
At The Care Workers’ Charity, we will keep doing both halves of this work. We support care workers directly when financial pressure tips into crisis, and we carry their voices into the rooms where decisions are made, as we did when our Advisory Board and Champions members took the wellbeing findings to Parliament. Pathways are a real step forward. Now we have to make sure they lead somewhere worth going.
