Social Care Wales provides effective, high quality and sustainable services

As a national leadership organisation, we have a responsibility to lead by example in how we work.

To be effective, we must understand the challenges and opportunities faced by those working in social care and early years. We continue to work with them to make sure our services meet their changing needs. We use feedback to challenge and shape our business, projects and plans.

We continued to show the openness and transparency of our decision making (governance) in the way we work and spend public money as we realise our five-year plan.

We received positive reports from Audit Wales and our internal auditors about our governance arrangements, as well as positive feedback from our sponsoring Minister and Welsh Government officials about our work to support the sector.

In 2023 to 2024, we:

• published our Impact report, showing the progress we had made during the first year of our five-year strategic plan 2022 to 2027

• ran an extensive recruitment campaign with Welsh Government’s public appointments team to look for new Board members. We recruited 11 new Board members – six will take up their role in April 2024 and the other five will start in April 2025

• recruited a new chief executive

• shared how we work with the Welsh Language standards

• put our internal marketing and communications approach and digital strategy in place to support the way in which we work and communicate with those who use our services. We want to make sure our online services align with our growing audiences and that our content and platforms are accessible, easy to use and meet our audiences’ needs

• carried out a skills audit with our staff to support our three-year staff training, learning and development plan

• kept our ISO27001 accreditation and achieved Cyber Essentials accreditation

• progressed our Decarbonisation action plan – since 2019, we’ve reduced our carbon footprint by 44 per cent

More than 500,000 people visited our website

We had more than 7,000 followers on X (Twitter), more than 5,000 followers on Facebook and 2,000 followers on LinkedIn.

By the end of March 2024, we had:

• 234 staff members

• recruited 44 new employees

• 5.5% staff turnover

• 3.6% sickness absence rate

• 1.3% sickness absence rate, if we exclude long-term sickness

• 91.2% staff engagement score

• clean audit certificate shown in our annual accounts