In our latest guest blog Natalie Fleming, Analysis team leader in Workforce Intelligence at Skills for Care, talks about her experience and learning from the process of achieving accredited official statistics status for an official statistic. Natalie joined Skill for Care’s Workforce Intelligence team as a data analyst in January 2022 after working in the NHS. Skills for Care is an official statistics producer with one accredited official statistic and plans for more in future.
Recently, Skills for Care underwent an assessment by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) that resulted in the accreditation of its workforce statistics. I’ve personally learnt a lot during this assessment process; it’s changed the way we work as a team and as a wider organisation.
Skills for Care manages the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set (ASC-WDS) and produces reports using data from it on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care. We are in a relatively unique position as an independent organisation, not a government body, unlike many other official statistics producers like NHS England or the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Our users include colleagues in government, local authorities, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), academics and care providers. Due to the importance of the ASC-WDS data, it is vital that we demonstrate our findings are robust and reliable so that our users can have the highest levels of confidence.
Skills for Care’s journey to becoming an official statistics producer began in 2018, when the ‘Personal Social Services: Staff of Social Services Departments’ report began a transition of ownership from NHS Digital (now part of NHS England) to Skills for Care. In 2021, it was renamed to ‘The workforce employed by adult social services departments in England’. You can find the latest report from February 2026 on our website. This report kick-started the official statistics assessment process, which has ultimately impacted the way the team collects, analyses and creates all of our outputs.
The first step was working with OSR colleagues in 2022 to formally acknowledge our voluntary adoption of elements of the Code of Practice for Statistics, namely the three core principles of Trustworthiness, Quality and Value. Then in 2023, Skills for Care was added to The Official Statistics Order 2023, making us a producer of official statistics – hooray! The third and final step came during 2024 and 2025: this was the assessment process to determine whether the ‘The workforce employed by adult social services departments in England’ report could become an accredited official statistic. The report finally became an accredited official statistic in February 2025 – a huge achievement both for the team and for the wider organisation.
A key area of improvement for my Workforce Intelligence team was accessibility – in every sense of the word. First, we’ve adopted a new written report template which is better suited to screen readers and has helpful features for users with accessibility needs. Second, we have worked over the last few years to improve the designs of our data visualisations. This means users can access a vast amount of data in a clear visual way. This improvement is highly valued by our users, who often prefer the visualisations to written analysis or spreadsheets. Third, we’ve published a full methodology paper describing how we create our workforce estimates on our methodology webpage. This is an improvement on our old page, which was much more light-touch, and now offers the full details of the methodology. This new document won’t interest all our users, but for those detail-orientated readers it gives a much greater understanding and insight into our processes.
Lastly, in October 2025 Skills for Care launched our new and improved Workforce Intelligence website. The previous version was several years old and was originally designed for a much smaller portfolio of reports. As the product owner of the website redevelopment project, I oversaw user research with many users from different backgrounds across the sector. From these sessions, new user-led and then user-tested designs were developed. One aspect of the new site I’m particularly proud of is the improved accessibility features. The wording has been simplified and streamlined on every page, and the navigation menu altered to enhance the visibility of all parts of the website. We’ve received feedback that this has made a really positive difference for our users.
Since gaining official statistics producer status, other teams across Skills for Care have also improved their ways of working and processes when using our data. My team works collaboratively with colleagues in the Policy, Comms and Marketing teams to ensure findings are reported accurately and consistently when promoting new publications. This continues throughout the year via bulletins, newsletters and on social media.
Skills for Care has fully embraced being an official statistics producer. The organisation does a lot more than just data analysis, but the lessons learnt from our user research sessions and documentation spurred on from the OSR assessment process are driving other changes. Our official statistics producer status is helping to drive our internal data strategy, and more conversations are taking place about use of data in different teams. The Marketing team is also looking to upgrade Skills for Care’s other websites and using user research information and examples from the Workforce Intelligence website as part of this. This will ultimately mean all users and partners of Skills for Care will have an improved experience, and it’s lovely to see our hard work being championed by other teams across the organisation.