Where England’s young jobseekers are, and where its unfilled care posts are. They are not the same places, and they are not reliably different ones either.
The care sector is widely assumed to be the natural destination for young people who are not in education, employment or training. This index tests that against where the vacancies actually are. It plots every upper-tier English authority by the share of its 16 to 24 year olds claiming unemployment-related benefits against its adult social care vacancy rate. Nationally, the two are all but unrelated. Unfilled care posts are not concentrated where young jobseekers are, nor reliably away from them. That is precisely why the places where both run high are worth naming: a youth-to-care pathway is a local matching problem, not a national one.
Each authority is shaded by how far it is into the top of both distributions at once. An area only darkens when its youth claimant rate and its care vacancy rate are both high, so the deepest shading marks the places where a youth-to-care pathway has the people and the posts in the same borough or county.
The score is the lower of an authority’s two percentile ranks, so a score of 90 means it sits in the top tenth on the claimant rate and in the top tenth on the vacancy rate. Being high on one alone cannot lift it. Hover, tap or use the list to select an area; selecting it also fills in the comparison below and finds it in the table.
Hover or tap any point for detail, then tap again to find it in the table. Dashed lines mark the median on each axis, which is what splits the four groups. Both axes start at zero, so distance along each one is directly comparable between authorities.
There is a trap in this data, and it matters because workforce planning mostly runs on regional figures. Average these same authorities into the nine English regions and the relationship between youth disengagement and unfilled care posts turns strong, clean and statistically significant. It is an artefact of the averaging.
Both panels use the same axes and the same underlying authorities. Only the unit of analysis changes. London is drawn separately because it sets the regional line: the lowest NEET rate in England and the highest regional vacancy rate.
Nine points is few enough that one unusual region decides the answer. Split London back into its 33 councils and the pattern it appeared to establish for the whole country disappears. Anyone testing this question at regional level will find a strong relationship and will be wrong, which is worth knowing given that the Youth Guarantee is being delivered regionally.
The same section also settles the obvious objection to the claimant count, that it misses young people who are not in education, employment or training and do not claim. Measured directly on the Department for Education’s NEET figures for 16 and 17 year olds, the authority-level correlation is –, against – on the claimant count. Neither is distinguishable from no relationship at all.
How does your local authority compare?
| Authority | Region | 16–24 claimants | Claimant rate | Care vacancy rate | Unfilled posts | Group |
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Why this matters. England has roughly 96,000 unfilled adult social care posts and about 288,000 people aged 16 to 24 claiming, three young claimants for every vacant post. But the two are almost entirely uncorrelated across authorities, so a national target for moving young people into care work tells you nothing about whether it can be delivered anywhere in particular. In 37 authorities both run above the median, and those are where a pathway can be built out of people who already live there: they hold about 26,000 unfilled posts and 74,000 young claimants between them. Croydon, Halton, Blackburn with Darwen, Barking and Dagenham, Doncaster, Peterborough and Blackpool are the clearest cases.
A correction worth stating. An earlier version of this analysis used projected growth in the population aged 85 and over as a proxy for where care demand would be, and found a clear negative relationship: ageing fastest in rural and coastal England, young jobseekers concentrated in the cities. Actual vacancy data does not support using that as a guide to where the jobs are. Barking and Dagenham has the slowest projected growth in its 85 and over population of anywhere in England and the highest care vacancy rate in the country. Vacancies today are driven by turnover, pay and local labour market competition rather than by age structure, so this index uses the vacancies themselves.
Sources and method. Care vacancy rates and unfilled post counts are Skills for Care Adult Social Care Workforce Data, the 2025/26 workforce estimates from the trended data download, all sectors and all services. Skills for Care state that local authority information in that release is correct as at September 2025 and that independent sector information comes from the Adult Social Care Workforce Data Set as at March 2026. Youth claimant counts are the ONS and DWP Claimant Count for those aged 16 to 24 via Nomis for July 2026, the latest month published, aggregated from district to upper-tier authority using the ONS 2023 lower-tier to upper-tier lookup, and expressed as a share of the ONS mid-2025 resident population aged 16 to 24. Correlation is Pearson’s r. The four groups split at the median of each axis, so they describe an authority’s position relative to the rest of England rather than any absolute threshold.
What this does not show. The claimant count is not the same as being NEET. It excludes young people not in education, employment or training who do not claim, who are a substantial share of the total. The vacancy snapshot and the claimant snapshot are about four months apart, March and July 2026. Vacancies have been falling: the national rate is 6.2% in 2025/26, down from 7.0% and a 2021/22 peak of 10.4%, so this is a picture of a tightening rather than a worsening shortage. One authority is absent for want of a published vacancy rate, leaving 152 of 153. A high vacancy rate is a measure of unfilled posts, not of unmet need: an area can have low vacancies and still be short of care.
This index supports Bridgehead’s adult social care workforce research for the Care Association Alliance.