Suicide by social workers in the last 15 years

FOI reference: FOI-2026-3745 

You asked

Please provide all stats concerning death by suicide of social workers in the last 15 years. Some of these figures are already available via your website however, I cannot see all the information.

We said

Thank you for your request. 

We have published some of the information you require in this user requested dataset. This dataset provides the number of deaths due to suicide by occupation for deaths registered in England and Wales in each year, 2011 to 2020. The number of deaths for social workers, broken down by country of residence and sex, can be found in Table 4 of each dataset.  

For deaths registered in each year 2021 to 2025:

• 2021 – 6

• 2022 – 11

• 2023 – 8

• 2024 – 10

• 2025 – 3

For deaths registered between 2011 and 2022, social workers were coded to the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2010 code 2442. Deaths registered from 2023 on were coded to SOC 2020 code 2461. 

Please note that numbers of deaths cannot be used to ascertain the risk of suicide among occupations. Differences in numbers of deaths may merely reflect the underlying population structure as opposed to differences in risk.

Further breakdowns of these figures by country and sex can be created via our bespoke services route. Please contact Health.Data@ons.gov.uk for more information.  Such services are subject to legal frameworks, resources and agreement of costs, subject to our charging policy.