We are responsible for producing and publishing data and intelligence on the social service workforce in Scotland under the Regulation of Care (Scotland) Act 2001.

We are an Accredited Official Statistics provider which means we comply with the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) Code of Practice for Statistics.

We produce workforce data, information and intelligence that supports planning for the development of the social service workforce and services. This is to make sure that services are available for people who receive care and support.

Organisations that use our data and intelligence are involved in the planning of social services and policy implementation, both at national and local levels, for example Scottish Government, COSLA, local authorities and health and social care partnerships.

The data also helps private and voluntary sector organisations that deliver care services. Other bodies, organisations and individuals who use our data include the media, trade unions and representative bodies.

Publications

We publish a range of reports examining workforce data each year, including:

• The Scottish Social Services Workforce Data report
• The Mental Health Officers report
• Joint Care Inspectorate/SSSC Vacancy report
• six-monthly whole time equivalent social work numbers and vacancies in local authorities reports.

We also publish other reports using our Register and fitness to practise data.

Workforce Data website

All our publications (reports and data sets) are available on our Workforce Data website.

We use data from two distinct sets of data to inform our publications. One is the workforce data set which includes all workers in social work, social care and children and young people’s services, irrespective of whether they are registered with the SSSC or not. The other is the registration data set which includes only workers registered with the SSSC.

We also have an Explore the data section where people can create their own charts and tables using some of the data underpinning our main publications.

You can find out more about our data collection and our data sets that provide more detailed data than is available in most of the reports on our Workforce Data website.