UberCaring © being ushered in by DfE Home Again plans for Regional Care Cooperatives – here’s how.

Ubercaring © article #1

The current DfE plethora of policy is not being given time for reasoned cool consideration. No space is being given to reflective, critical or alternative thinking.

Over the next two weeks NCERCC intends to publish a series of reflective, critical or alternative pieces that address the policy programme – we are them calling the UberCaring © series.

Reflective, critical or alternative thinking

One thought through critical perspective comes from twinning the understanding of ‘platform capitalism’ and metric driven care.

This twinned perspective directly challenges the systemic assumptions underlying the DfE’s idea of the operation of an integrated care framework.

The Core Tension

The DfE Home Again policy seeks to streamline services across social care, health, and education using a “single, coordinated plan” to prevent vulnerable children from being placed in what is high cost, out-of-area, or unregistered care.

While “Home Again” is framed DfE as a benevolent crackdown on the profiteering care market it is not the only view that can be taken. It has been received without critiques being given equal prominence.

Adopting another perspective reveals how its reliance on centralisation, standardised outputs, and cross-agency data integration risks reducing complex human suffering into managed corporate metrics.

1. The Critique of Marketised Solutions and Anti-Profiteering

• The Policy Goal: “Home Again” explicitly aims to “drive out profiteering” by some high-cost care providers.
• The UberCaring © Analysis: This work highlights that simply shifting away from overt corporate profiteers does not automatically eliminate the “logic of the market”. The rapidly developing alternative view is that austerity causes the national and local state to adopt the exact same corporate behaviours they claim to fight, such as treating children’s care as a transaction, tracking success through rigid algorithms, and standardising human relationships.  The warnings over many years of the commodification of child care are being realised.

2. Datafication of Despair vs. The Single Plan

• The Policy Goal: “Home Again” relies heavily on cross-agency data (“data driven services”) sharing to build a single tracking profile for children (the single identifier) for looked after children, multiple co-occurring interacting high level needs certainly, perhaps at the threshold of a Deprivation of Liberty Order.
• The UberCaring © Analysis: The “datafication of despair” occurs when a child’s psychological trauma is funnelled into a highly bureaucratised digital system, the system prioritises “measurable metrics” over the messy reality of trauma. Under this model, success is easily reduced to a checklist (e.g., keeping a child physically located in a region) rather than genuine emotional recovery. Under an UberCaring regime needs and the response become data points.

3. Attrition by Design and Systemic Shifting

• The Policy Goal: The DfE wants to drastically reduce the duration and frequency of residential placements, perhaps repeat placements, and especially Deprivation of Liberty orders by utilising “proportionate and evidence-based support.”
• The UberCaring © Analysis: The concept of “attrition by design” is observable where platforms intentionally create frictionless pathways to cheap, standardised interventions to avoid deeper, more expensive care. Applied to “Home Again,” this analysis warns that the pressure to lower costs may lead local Regional Care Cooperatives (RCCs) to favour rapid, short-term behavioural fixes (the policy equivalent of “CBT-lite”) over the long-term, intensive developmental human relationships that other assessment pathways may see as required.

4. Precarious Labour and the Dilution of Enduring Relationships

• The Policy Goal: The above theoretical exposition that is its policy the DfE is twinned with another centred on fostering and what are termed “enduring relationships” for looked after child/children in care and care-experienced children.
• The UberCaring ©Analysis: In response and with an understanding of the implications for Home Again in reality the challenging question can be posed, ‘Can you have stable care without stable workers?’ The platformisation of care degrades working conditions, leading to low pay, high turnover, and precarious roles. If the “Home Again” multi-agency framework relies on an underfunded, high-turnover workforce in reality the state’s promise of “enduring relationships” becomes an impossible structural paradox.

A reading list will be included in the series.