Skills for Care, the national charity focused on building a stronger workforce for social care, has published its latest Social Care Workforce Race Equality Standard (SC-WRES) Annual National Report.
The latest annual report reveals persistent racial inequalities across England’s adult and children’s social care workforce and provides the most comprehensive national evidence to date on this topic.
The 2025/26 report is based on data submitted by 99 local authorities, representing around 70% of the adult social care workforce and more than 132,700 staff across adult and children’s services. This marks a significant increase in coverage from 43% the previous year, alongside a substantial rise in participation from children’s services.
The report finds that across every stage of the workforce journey clear and consistent disparities affect staff from Black, Asian and minoritised ethnic backgrounds.
Key findings include:
- 16% of global majority applicants were appointed from shortlist compared to 28.8% of white applicants.
- Global majority employees were 50% more likely to enter formal disciplinary processes.
- Employees of Black, Asian or minority ethnicities were 37% less likely be working in senior management roles compared to employees of white ethnicities.
- Employees of Black, Asian or minority ethnicities were 15% more likely to leave their role.
- Staff from Black, Asian and minoritised ethnic backgrounds reported 48% higher rates of harassment, bullying or abuse from colleagues.
- Global majority staff are more likely to be concentrated in mid-range pay bands and less likely to be represented in the highest pay brackets than their white colleagues.
Despite increasing diversity within the workforce, with around 22% of adult social care staff from minoritised ethnicities, the report makes clear that representation alone does not deliver equity.
Professor Oonagh Smyth, OBE, Chief Executive Officer, Skills for Care, said:
“These findings reinforce the importance of the SC-WRES Improvement Programme’s emphasis on collaborative, anti-racist approaches to addressing these systemic workforce challenges. We have seen and are seeing division within our communities in recent years and as a sector we must reach out and stand together to ensure our workforce is representative, supported, and safe from bullying and harassment in all its forms.”
SC‑WRES is a national improvement programme supporting local authorities to make measurable, sustained improvements in race equity across the social care workforce.
The programme is designed not just to measure inequality, but to drive change. It is an anti-racist improvement framework grounded in a human rights approach and focused on continuous improvement.
