This report examines who is leaving the SSSC Register, why and where they are moving to. We are now publishing this real time data on the SSSC data website.
This report is based on data from 2,003 people who left the Register between August and December 2024. There was a clear relationship between age group and likelihood to respond to the survey, with older workers generally being more likely to respond than younger ones. We saw a similar pattern with the length of time that the leaver had been on the Register. Retirement, health and poor terms and conditions are the top reasons given for people leaving the Register. This is the first collection of this data so the findings are preliminary until we have more to work with but we believe it is useful to publish the findings so far.
Our data
SSSC Chief Executive, Maree Allison said:
’We are sharing our early findings on those leaving the SSSC Register to help understand the recruitment and retention challenges currently experienced across social work, social care and children and young people’s services.
‘This analysis highlighted some issues that we are keen to explore further. We want to have a better understanding of the age profile of people leaving the Register and whether there are significant numbers of younger or older workers leaving.
‘Almost half of respondents said they were moving to the health or education sectors and we will look to better categorise the “other” sectors people are moving to as well as the employer type people are moving to and from. We also saw that retirement, health, poor terms and conditions and career opportunities outside social services are reported as the top reasons for people leaving the Register. The analysis has given us some useful early intelligence but we will need more data to make better, more firm conclusions.
‘I hope this new set of data, which we now publish live on our data website, can support planning and improvement across the workforce and ultimately improve outcomes for people who use services.
‘Thank you to everyone who took the time to complete the survey and give us an insight to why people leave the social service sector.’
Initial findings in our report
We intend to review and revise the leavers’ survey to obtain more specific leavers’ data. We will launch a new survey and publish data from that on our data website. Collating more specific data over time will provide a richer and more accurate explanation of why people leave the SSSC Register and/or leave positions in social work, social care, or children and young people’s services.
Our initial findings show that:
- there is a clear relationship between age group and length of time on the Register, with older workers and leavers who have been on the Register longer more likely to respond
- retirement was the top reason for leaving for each part of the Register, accounting for 18% overall
- health reasons ranked third overall, second for social care workers and fourth for social workers
- poor terms and conditions and alternative career opportunities were the next highest reasons for both children and young people and social care registrants
- almost half of respondents said they were moving to the health or education sectors
- the two youngest age groups (16-24 and 25-34) make up over 41% of leavers and 34% of all on the Register.
Read the full report the SSSC Register Leavers Survey Report: April 2025 on the SSSC’s data website here.
See the real time data on SSSC Register Leavers on the SSSC data website.