Our analysis focused on workers in the residential care sector, a subset of the social care workforce who are mostly employed in nursing and care homes and assisted-living housing. We pooled data from 2017/18 to 2019/20 to increase the sample, except for the food insecurity measure which was only introduced in 2019/20. This gave us a sample size of 1,488.
We compared rates of poverty and spain rcs data deprivation among residential care staff with levels among all UK workers and those in industries which compete with the social care sector for staff: health, administration, hospitality and retail. Recent Health Foundation analysis finds that the lowest paid care workers are most likely to come from sales and retail assistant roles. When leaving, they most commonly move into nursing roles. Administration, hospitality and retail are also among the lowest paid sectors.
There were several limitations to our analysis. our analysis to the residential care sector and exclude staff in other care settings because of limitations with other relevant groupings for employment sectors in the data (for example, home care workers were grouped with staff in children’s nurseries). We also didn’t use data from 2020/21 because of the impact of the pandemic, which meant the sample size was much smaller than previous surveys. And pandemic measures (such as the furlough scheme) meant that data on income and living standards were difficult to interpret and not comparable to previous years.