Care workers are central to delivering care, yet too often excluded from shaping it. Karolina Gerlich, Chief Executive at The Care Workers’ Charity, explores why moving from inclusion to true co-production is essential to creating a system that reflects reality and works for everyone.
Walk into most conferences shaping the future of adult social care and look at who is on the panel. You will find commissioners, senior leaders and policymakers. You will find people who have spent careers thinking about care. What you will rarely find is a care worker.
That absence is not incidental. It reflects something systemic about how the sector values, or fails to value, the people doing the work. Strategies get written, frameworks are published and guidance gets issued. Something essential is missing from all of them – the knowledge that only comes from being present where care actually happens. Knowledge that comes from understanding not just what a policy says but what it means practically when you are the person expected to implement it.
Social care has a long history of decisions being made about care workers rather than with them. The expertise that care workers hold, built through their daily relationship and accumulated professional judgement and proximity to the people they support, has too often been treated as less than essential. The result is guidance that does not reflect the realities of the job and systems designed without adequate understanding of what they were being designed for.
Co-production is the answer to that gap. Not consultation, not token representation, but partnership in which care workers help shape the decisions, tools and systems that define their working lives and the lives of the people they support. As someone who has worked in care, this is not an abstract principle. It is the difference between work that reflects reality and work that does not.
At The Care Workers’ Charity, co-production is not just a project. It is a discipline. Our Advisory Board and Champions network ensures that care workers with genuine demographic diversity are involved in shaping our work from the outset. Voices of Care brings the workforce together in a shared forum so that their collective experience has somewhere to go and something to influence. When we developed guidance on the responsible use of AI in adult social care, we did it with care workers, alongside Oxford University’s Centre for Ethics in AI, because guidance that does not reflect the realities of those expected to follow it is not really guidance at all. The same principle shaped our work with care workers on a guide to CQC. Our survey work, with our 2027 Carer Wellbeing Survey now live, remains one of the most direct ways we listen to what the workforce is actually experiencing.
The Rayne Foundation’s support for this work reflects a shared conviction: that investing in care worker voice is not peripheral. It is foundational.
What these efforts have in common is not complexity. They require commitment, and they require a willingness to slow down and do things properly. But the barrier to doing them is lower than the sector sometimes assumes. What is required, above all, is the belief that care workers belong in the room where decisions are made because the work is worse without them.
Too much of what gets decided about social care is still decided without the people who deliver it. Too many strategies are shaped by people who have never held this job, and it shows in the gap between what those strategies promise and what care workers experience on the ground. Care workers carry extraordinary responsibility, often in difficult circumstances and with limited resources. They hold relationships, deep knowledge and practical wisdom that are genuinely irreplaceable. Leaving that out of how the sector thinks does not just feel wrong. It produces worse outcomes for everyone, including the people drawing on care.
Inclusion is a starting point. It matters and it should not be taken for granted. But co-production is where the real work begins: the harder, more honest process of building something together that actually reflects the world care workers live and work in every day.
