15-05-2025
It is time to call care workers like me skilled – and pay us properly for all that we do
At work, I am part psychologist, nurse, bereavement counsellor, occupational therapist, mental health advocate, group therapist and palliative care expert. What am I? The answer, of course, is a care worker. And yet this week, the message from the government was that I – and thousands like me – are 'low-skilled'. Tell that to the people we look after and the families who love them.
When Labour announced plans on Monday to scrap a visa scheme for overseas social care recruitment in a drive to bring down 'low-skilled' migration, it was just the latest in a long line of negative messages about the sector I work in. The irony, though, is that we need to value caring now more than ever because the industry is in crisis, and what's keeping it afloat is the goodwill of workers – mostly women.
Around 80 per cent of carers are female – their work is critically undervalued financially, but also socially. Wages are low, we're constantly being told we have no skills, and it's leaving many of us feeling unappreciated and invisible. But after working in social care for more than three decades, I know from experience how complex the work we do is and why we have to recognise its worth more than ever.
I started working as a carer when I was 26 after training as a nurse and developing an interest in community care. Today, I work as a manager at a medium-sized family-run home called the Alexander Care Home in Morley, Leeds, and I'm lucky to be part of a team that feels like a family. But there's no doubt that caring is tougher now than when I started out because a lot of the people who would once have had specialist nursing care are now being looked after in the community.
It means cases are increasingly complicated and carers need everything from physical to mental skills to manage them. You need resilience, patience and tenacity for a start, as well as practical and technical knowledge, physical fitness, and most essentially empathy and the emotional intelligence to be able to connect with people.
And ironically, it is this emotional skill needed that is, I believe, a key part of why caring is so chronically undervalued. It's no coincidence that traditionally male, practical jobs like plumbing or electrics are seen as highly skilled and often well paid, while the 'softer' skills needed to be a carer are just seen as an extension of what women do for our families every day and are not financially rewarded. But these are skills that you can't measure on paper.
Caring professionally for people who aren't relatives requires a whole different skill set on top of that. You have to be able to quickly adapt because no two days are the same, project manage and balance short-term decisions with a long-term view. The patient who is too weak to move into a chair today may develop pressure sores tomorrow. Our work is a constant stream of tiny but critical assessments of everything from physical state to mood.
While some people come into it with few academic qualifications, everyone has to undergo intense training in everything from health and safety to wound management once they start. I've often seen, however, that even when carers develop huge competence at work, they lack the confidence to see what they are worth, and they don't see those skills as transferable. I work with so many incredible women, with a lot of skills, who have no idea of just how good they are.
Every area of social care has different challenges. Those working with people affected by neurodevelopmental issues, for instance, might have to develop a lot of skills to deal with complex identity and independence issues. In elderly care, we are working with those who've usually experienced significant loss – whether it's a partner or a home – and we have to work through their grief, convince them that their new life, or that of a partner, is not an end, it's just the start of something new.
Yet despite this important work, many colleagues don't like to admit publicly that they're a care worker because it's not seen as an achievement, and they're often judged. The only time we got an uplift in public perception was during Covid, but I still feel that what carers went through then has not been recognised in the same way that the contribution of those working in the NHS was.
Then, I was asking young women to come into work, often being paid just above minimum wage, to be on the frontline of the pandemic with no protection because all the PPE was diverted elsewhere. I was overwhelmed by the number of them who chose to work even when they were facing true trauma. People walked through the door every day knowing they could take Covid home to their family, and it was the time when all the many levels of our collective expertise and knowledge were really proven. And yet we are still considered low-skilled workers. What other job asks so much for so little in return?
There needs to be a shift in our value system about what is socially and financially rewarded. Work as anything from a train driver to a lawyer, and you'll be valued in different ways. Not so for carers, despite the incredibly important work we do. Most of us know we could earn the same working in a supermarket or fast-food chain, but we want to make a difference, make others feel comfortable and safe. We respect elderly people who have contributed and now need looking after. It's about a value system that we believe in, our capacity to care for our most vulnerable people. It is valuable work that should be equally valued. The pandemic showed what happens when that system breaks down.
What we do is a form of intelligence; it's all about human skills that not everyone has. It's time that, at the very least, the government started to respect those skills. Because, as carers, we don't just look after individuals, we look after whole families and society too.
As told to Megan Lloyd-Davies
