How Diversity and Inclusion Shape the Way We Care 

Before we can talk about inclusion, it helps to understand whom we're actually talking about. According to Skills for Care, the adult social care sector in England comprises approximately 1.59 million people. The workforce is predominantly female (around 78%), and ethnically diverse, with 36% of the workforce identifying as Black, Asian or from a minoritised ethnic background, compared to 19% of the general population. 

But data only tells part of the story, meaning that behind statistics there is a person with their own history and their own reason for choosing this work, including neurodivergent workers - people with dyslexia, ADHD, autism, and other cognitive differences - who are present across the sector in significant numbers, often without formal identification or workplace support. 

A diverse workforce mirrors the communities it serves, and enriches the quality of care. When a care worker shares their cultural background, a language, or a life experience with the person they support, misunderstandings dissolve, trust builds more quickly, and behaviours or habits that might seem challenging in one context are recognised, in another context, as entirely ordinary. The same is true of cognitive diversity, as a neurodivergent worker may bring a different way of reading a situation, noticing distress, or building rapport, one that proves invaluable. 

Through shared humour, communication style, food, music, or simply personality, diversity gives people drawing on care a wider range of human connections to draw from. 

The connection between personal identity and professional practice is something care workers speak about often. Through its direct engagement with the workforce, The Care Workers Charity highlights how lived experience, cultural background, and public perceptions of the profession all shape how care workers understand both themselves and their role. 

From our direct engagement with care workers, the link between the role and the person is a strong one. Care workers are caring people and that rarely stops at the end of a shift. Their identity and background also show up in the care itself. We hear about care workers bringing a dish from their home country in for the people they support to try or drawing on their own experience of caring for a relative to recognise what someone needs before they ask.   

What interests us is the other direction: how the sectors and society’s perception of care workers shapes how they seem themselves. Care workers are told repeatedly that their work is low-skilled and that ‘anyone can do it’ because no formal qualifications are required. This narrative is harmful and reductive, but it takes hold. We hear care workers describe themselves as ‘just a care worker’ with striking regularity.   

What they want understood is straightforward. Care work is skilled professional work involving judgement, risk and responsibility, carried out by people who are among the lowest paid professionals in the country. What they are asking for is their skill and professionalism to be recognised, both in and out of the sector.

What's the distinction between inclusivity and belonging? 

In short, inclusivity is about removing barriers, whereas belonging is about what happens after those barriers come down - the day-to-day feeling of being seen and part of something. 

You can have policies that tick all the boxes and still have a team where people feel unseen. Belonging is built in moments we sometimes overlook - a manager who asks how your weekend was, a colleague who notices you're struggling, cultural celebrations through sharing food, wearing traditional dress, or learning about each other's backgrounds. 

For neurodivergent workers, belonging can hinge on something equally small - a manager or a team leader who doesn't question why someone needs written instructions instead of verbal ones, or a team that doesn't treat a different communication style as a problem to be managed. 

These things are connected. Whether someone feels they don't belong because of their ethnicity, their accent, their neurotype, or their disability, the experience of exclusion carries a similar weight: the sense that you must mask, minimise, or perform a version of yourself that isn't quite real in order to be accepted. 

Belonging is linked to psychological safety, and when that safety is absent, the consequences can be significant. Findings from The Care Workers Charity's wellbeing survey reveal the extent to which bullying, harassment, verbal abuse, and other forms of mistreatment continue to affect the workforce. The charity's conversations with care workers also provide valuable insight into who may be most vulnerable and why these experiences can have such a lasting impact on a person's sense of belonging. 

Belonging can often depend on feeling that your safety matters to the organisation you work for; what care workers often describe to us is the opposite. They tell us that experiencing or witnessing this behaviour leaves them feeling isolated and, in their words, disposable, despite the skill and dedication they bring every day.  

The response they receive is often what does the damage. Care workers describe being physically assaulted, including being punched, kicked, slapped and sexually assaulted by people they support, which is particularly common in dementia care. Where capacity is a factor, that is understood and accepted by care workers. What is not acceptable is the response: a behaviour chart opened, no action taken and the message that this is ‘simply part of the job’. A culture of expecting abuse has become a culture of accepting it. Care workers also describe being guilt tripped into covering shifts, told that someone will go without care if they do not come in, which places the responsibility for a staffing failure on the individual.  

Any care worker can be bullied, harassed or abused at work. However, we know that internationally recruited care workers are at risk of hyper-exploitation, and we hear frequently from people told that speaking up about poor practice will cost them their sponsorship. Due to their sponsorship being tied to a single employer, this threat is credible. Care workers in home care and live-in roles carry further risk, because lone working leaves no witnesses and situations reduced to one person’s word against another’s. 

When it comes to answering the question about what’s the best or most appropriate way to support a neurodivergent member of the team, the answer is simple - ask people what they need, and then support them however possible. 

In this context, support takes the form of a manager or a supervisor who sits down with someone and asks, ‘What would help you do your best work?’ and then listens. The smallest changes can have the biggest impact. Sharing interview questions in advance, for example, is an accessibility measure that benefits neurodivergent candidates, but it also reduces anxiety for anyone unfamiliar with a particular interview format, including international workers navigating a new professional culture. 

Technology, too, is a powerful and often underused enabler. Tools like screen readers, grammar-support software, and accessible device settings can transform someone's working day. Translated resources, visual guides, and flexible communication formats serve a similarly wide range of needs. 

What works for neurodivergent workers almost always works for everyone. 

Challenging the Assumptions That ‘Hold Us Back’

‘Neurodivergent people are less capable.’ - No. Neurodivergent workers often bring strengths like pattern recognition, big-picture thinking, creativity, problem-solving, and empathy.   

‘Diversity and inclusion are mainly a frontline issue,’ - Neurodivergence, disability, and the full spectrum of human identity exist at every level of the sector, including in senior leadership. The stigma that has historically prevented people from being open about this is real, but it is changing. 

‘A good care worker looks or sounds a certain way.’ - Accents, nationality, and the country where qualifications were gained are not measures of competence or professionalism, yet assumptions based on these factors are still made, often at first meeting, and they cost the sector talented, dedicated people. 

'Inclusion means making big, expensive changes for individuals.' -  In reality, these adjustments are usually small, low-cost, and benefit the whole team. The barrier is rarely financial. 

Many of the barriers to inclusion are rooted in long-standing assumptions about who care workers are and what their role involves. Through its advocacy work, The Care Workers Charity regularly hears how misconceptions about care work, professional expertise, gender, migration status, and other aspects of identity can shape the experiences of those working in the sector, often influencing how they view their own professional value and contribution. 

The central assumption, and the most damaging, is that care work is unskilled and it persists because the role is widely misunderstood. We hear members of the public and politicians describe care work as making tea and delivering personal care. Both are part of it, but the role also involves safeguarding, advocacy, risk management, clinical tasks delegated from healthcare professionals and sustained emotional demand.  

The assumption presents differently depending on where it comes from. From families, it often appears as surprise that a care worker has noticed something clinically significant. From commissioners, it appears in the belief that a 30-minute call is sufficient, a judgement made without consulting anyone who delivers it. From managers, it appears when a concern is treated as a complaint rather than as professional judgement. From colleagues in health, it appears as an assumption that a care worker will not understand the explanation.  

Beneath all of it sits the deeply embedded assumption that care work is women’s work. Long before it was a paid profession, this was labour women were expected to perform unpaid within their own families and that legacy has not disappeared because a wage is now attached. It shows up in how the profession is valued, in how little it pays relative to the skill and responsibility involved and in whose voices are heard when decisions about the sector are made. However, the workforce is shaped just as much by race, migration status, age, sexuality and disability, and those factors do not operate in isolation from one another. This is why we believe any serious effort to improve conditions for care workers must be intersectional. Treating the role of care worker as a single uniform experience risks solving problems for some while leaving others exactly where they started.  

The effect on professional identity is cumulative. If you are told often enough that the job requires nothing, you begin to believe that you bring nothing and you stop expecting to be listened to. That is why the work of our Care Worker Advisory Board and Champions Project matters. When care workers are brought in as equals and paid for their expertise, the change in how they describe themselves is immediate and significant.

Across all dimensions of diversity, the same patterns of inequity tend to emerge, for example: 

Pay and conditions remain inconsistent and, for many, inadequate - The Care Workers Charity Wellbeing Survey found that over a third of care workers are considering leaving their roles. With Skills for Care projecting a need for up to 470,000 additional posts by 2040 to meet the needs of an ageing population, the sector simply cannot afford to keep losing the people it has. 

Neurodivergent workers face a particular kind of exhaustion - High turnover in the sector compounds the instability that neurodivergent individuals may already experience. When the environment doesn't adapt, the cost is borne by the individual in the form of burnout, financial stress, and the feeling of wanting to stay but feeling unable to. 

Change requires everyone - care workers, providers, local authorities, commissioners, and policymakers - to play their part, but what are some starting points? 

• Standardise pay and conditions - across the sector, so that every care worker, regardless of employer, background, or location, receives fair, consistent treatment. 
• Open career pathways to international workers - visa structures can sometimes be a barrier to progression. Employers should encourage and support international staff to move into leadership. 
• Embed inclusion beyond recruitment - inclusion that stops at the point of hiring is not inclusion. Inclusion must continue through onboarding, training, day-to-day management, and leadership development. 
• Create structured spaces for shared learning - across organisations, between care workers, providers, and policymakers. Not as a blame exercise, but as a commitment to continuous, human-centred improvement. 
• Promote a culture where it's safe to ask - the fear of saying the wrong thing about someone's identity or preferences can stop people from having the conversations that build real relationships. Education and psychological safety make it possible to ask respectfully and to learn. 

The adult social care sector is a place where human beings show up for one another in fundamental ways. The people who do this work in all their diversity, with all their lived experience, their cultural knowledge and their individual ways of connecting are building relationships, holding lives, and making dignity possible for some of the most vulnerable people in our society, and deserve a sector that does the same for them.