Who speaks for the social care workforce? It’s 2026, and I’m still not sure it’s Skills for Care

A declaration of interest, up front: I lead a workforce development business that delivers training and qualifications in adult social care. Skills for Care quality-assures providers like mine, sets the standards we work to, and – as of this month – competes with us. You can read what follows with that in mind. I’d argue it’s precisely because I sit inside this system that the contradictions are so visible.

Why more e-learning won’t fix social care’s workforce crisis

Two announcements came out of Skills for Care this week. The first: the launch of The Training Hub, a paid eLearning offer that will build towards a full catalogue of statutory, mandatory, enhanced care, health and safety, and leadership courses over the next six months. The second: the news that its Chief Executive has been appointed a Trustee of Age UK.

Both may be perfectly worthy. Neither is what the sector needed from its workforce body in June 2026.

Consider what else is happening elsewhere. The Homecare Association regularly publishes analysis showing councils and NHS bodies still commission care below the verified cost of delivering it legally. Providers are working through the implications of a Fair Pay Agreement that the sector has repeatedly warned is underfunded. Vacancy rates, while improved, remain several times the national average. The Casey Commission grinds on.

Against that backdrop, the strategic workforce body for adult social care chose to make news about a product launch and a personnel appointment.

I don’t think that’s an accident of timing. I think it’s a window into priorities.

What employers are asking for in adult social care

I spend most of my working week with social care employers – registered managers, nominated individuals, HR leads, owners. Over the past twelve months they have raised, repeatedly and with increasing urgency: commissioning rates that don’t cover the cost of compliance; the gap between the Fair Pay Agreement’s ambitions and its funding; CQC assessment readiness; OMMT training, the use of AI, ongoing recruitment and retention; the administrative burden of evidencing training; and how to access the funding that does exist without drowning in process (ASC-WDS/LDSS).

Not one of them – literally not one – has told me the sector’s most pressing gap is a shortage of e-learning. The market is saturated with it. Some of it is excellent, some of it is poor (just like face-to-face training), and employers have been navigating that market for two decades. A new entrant in 2026, however well-intentioned, is answering a question nobody asked. Twenty years ago, this might have been pioneering. Today, it feels like an organisation reaching for something tangible to launch, rather than something the sector requested.

Skills for Care says providers “consistently told us” they need this. I’d genuinely like to see that evidence, because it is the opposite of what employers tell me – and, I suspect, the opposite of what they tell the Homecare Association, Care England and the National Care Forum too.

Skills for Care’s expanding role in training

Here is the structural problem, and it deserves to be stated plainly.

Skills for Care was instrumental in developing the Care Certificate and the standards that other training providers are measured against. It delivers the Quality Assured Care Learning Service (QACLS) on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care – the gateway that determines which providers’ courses are eligible for Learning and Development Support Scheme (LDSS) funding. And it now sells e-learning in direct competition with the providers it quality-assures, and how long before its own courses/qualifications become claimable through the very funding scheme it helps administer?

Standard-setter, funding gatekeeper, and market competitor. In any other sector, an arrangement like this would prompt serious governance questions. If Ofqual launched its own awarding organisation, or the CQC opened a chain of care homes, we would notice. I’m not suggesting impropriety – I’m suggesting the structure itself is the problem, because even a perfectly behaved referee shouldn’t be playing for one of the teams.

There may be a sympathetic explanation. The administration of ASYE and user-led organisation funding has just moved from Skills for Care to the NHS Business Services Authority; the LDSS claims service already sits there. As grant-funded administrative functions migrate elsewhere, a commercial training arm starts to look less like a response to sector need and more like a replacement income stream.

If that’s the reality, it deserves an honest conversation – not a press release insisting providers asked for it.

The governance challenge facing Skills for Care

Compare two organisations’ responses to government decisions.

When the Spring Statement failed to address the funding gap, the Homecare Association’s chief executive said publicly that the government was “driving homecare services towards collapse”. Its Minimum Price reports, built on hundreds of Freedom of Information requests, name the gap between what care costs and what the state pays, year after year, in pounds and pence.

When the government scrapped the planned increase to the adult social care training and development fund in 2024 – weeks after Skills for Care’s own – had called for a major expansion of training – Skills for Care said it was “disappointed”.

Disappointed. The flagship recommendation of the most significant piece of work in the organisation’s recent history was cut at the knees, and the strongest word available was the one you’d use for a cancelled dinner reservation.

That Workforce Strategy, to be clear, was a genuine achievement of convening: over a thousand contributors, a credible evidence base, serious recommendations – including a legislative footing for workforce planning and a central body to drive delivery. Nearly two years on, those recommendations sit unanswered while the Casey Commission occupies the strategic ground the strategy was meant to hold. Skills for Care convened brilliantly. It has championed timidly.

Some will say this isn’t its job – that Skills for Care is a delivery partner, not a representative body, and that robust public challenge belongs to membership organisations. Fine. But then the organisation should stop describing itself as the strategic voice for the workforce while behaving like a contractor.

You cannot claim the mantle of sector leadership in your branding and decline its responsibilities in your conduct. The funding relationship explains the caution – an organisation dependent on departmental grants and contracts has every incentive not to bite the hand – but explaining a constraint is not the same as accepting it. Charitable status is no barrier: charities campaign hard against the government every day. Age UK, as it happens, is rather good at it.

The social care workforce funding gap

One last detail. Skills for Care is currently canvassing training providers to discuss how it can support us. Among the questions on the table: why has uptake of the new Level 2 Adult Social Care Certificate qualification been so low?

Sit with that for a moment. The body that shaped the qualification, set the standards beneath it, and helps administer the funding that pays for it, is asking the provider market to explain why its product isn’t selling. Providers could answer in detail – funding friction, employer fatigue, unclear progression value, competing priorities – and many of us will, constructively. But the question itself reveals the deeper issue: an organisation that has drifted so far from the operational front line that it has to outsource the diagnosis of its own initiatives.

What good workforce leadership looks like

I want Skills for Care to succeed. The sector needs its data – the ASC-WDS and the annual State of the Adult Social Care Sector report are genuinely valuable, relied upon even by its critics. Nobody sensible wants the organisation diminished.

But it’s 2026, and the sector deserves clarity. Either Skills for Care is a delivery body – in which case it should embrace that role, separate its commercial activity cleanly from its standard-setting and gatekeeping functions, and drop the implied claim to speak for the workforce. Or it intends to be the strategic voice it markets itself as – in which case that means published positions on funding decisions, public challenge when the evidence demands it, and the willingness to make a Secretary of State uncomfortable occasionally.

What the sector cannot afford is the current ambiguity: an organisation that enjoys the authority of sector leadership, the security of government funding, and the revenues of a commercial provider, while accepting the accountabilities of none of them.

The workforce crisis in adult social care is the defining domestic policy failure of a generation. The people doing this work, and the employers holding services together, deserve a national body that fights for them with the same energy it puts into launching products. This week’s news suggests we’re still waiting.

Steve Helsby is a co-founder at EdgeWorks™