Adult social care is essential to a fair and thriving Scotland, yet public understanding often doesn’t reflect its purpose or value. The conversation is dominated by crisis, cost and complexity, which makes it harder to build the shared commitment needed for change.

Reframing Public Perceptions of Social Care examines what people currently think and feel about adult social care, why these views persist, and how better narratives can support sustainable reform. Our work brings together research evidence, lived experience and sector insight to develop practical ways of talking about care that strengthen understanding and hope.

What People Know (And What They Don’t)

Research show that many people have only a vague idea of what social care covers, how it’s funded and how it differs from health services or social work. For example, we know people have:

• Strong recognition that social care matters, but weak understanding of what it actually does day to day.
• A tendency to see social care as a crisis service rather than something that enables people to live well.
• Low familiarity with the workforce and what care, support and assistance roles involve.
• Limited sense of the scale of unmet need or the structural pressures facing the system.

People also draw on intuitive explanations that can get in the way of progress:

• “It’s an individual responsibility, not a shared one.”
• “It’s just for older people.”
• “It’s always been in crisis.”
• “It’s too big or broken to fix.”

Common reasons for dissatisfaction

Polling from the British Social Attitudes Survey shows that over the past five years satisfaction with social care has fallen sharply across Great Britain. In 2023, 59% of people in Scotland reported that they were either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with social care (there were no statistically significant differences between the nations).

When people feel frustrated about adult social care, the explanations often fall into a small number of themes:

• Long waits or difficulties accessing support.
• Perceived unfairness or inconsistency between local areas.
• Concerns about staffing and the stability of the workforce.
• A sense that the system is complex, confusing or opaque.

These concerns shape how people interpret messages about reform, funding and policy choices.

Across the UK, when social care appears in the news, on TV or in political debate, the focus is often on crisis (underfunding, rising demand and failures) especially in relation to older people. Positive accounts of what good support can achieve are far less visible (Corpus, 2020). Campaigners argue this makes the sector seem like a costly safety net rather than a driver of wellbeing and inclusion.

Lessons From Elsewhere

Movements like Social Care Future, which operate in England, have set out an alternative vision, describing care as a ‘springboard’ for living a good life, rooted in community, rights and relationships. They have worked with communications experts to develop new ways of talking about social care using shared values, hopeful metaphors and examples that show its benefit to everyone. Testing in England suggests these approaches can shift people’s associations from dependency and vulnerability to independence, community and mutual support.

This approach has been used in other UK policy fields, such as poverty reduction, where it helped charities adopt more dignified and hopeful messages. Success depends on careful planning, knowing your audience, and repeating the message widely over time in the media, in politics and in everyday conversations.

What we do in this project

Reframing Public Perceptions of Social Care works to understand these perceptions and reshape the narrative in ways that build support for meaningful change. Specifically, we:

• Review research on public attitudes to adult social care.
• Map the dominant mindsets that shape how people make sense of care.
• Work with sector partners to co-design clearer, values-led narratives.
• Develop and test shared frames, metaphors and explanations.
• Produce tools that organisations can use in their own communications.
• Build capacity through workshops, action learning sets and practical guidance.

Our aim is to support a sector-wide shift towards messaging that is hopeful, accurate and aligned: strengthening the environment for policy and practice reform.

Learn more

You can explore our evidence and early findings in the Discussion Paper (2025) and Evidence Review (2024) on our Resources page.