Ubercaring – the premise and the promise of the concept and method

The Ubercaring concept develops a critical framework for understanding emerging transformations in Residential Child Care in England arising from the rapid policy activity of the Department for Education – Home again.

Ubercaring is defined as the interlocked processes of marketisation, commodification, and standardisation of care, where Residential Child Care becomes shaped by financial logics, data extraction, and algorithmic management rather than relational practice or professional judgement. Increasingly Ubercaring  has nothing, or at least very little, to do with care.

We start by observing two accelerating trends.

First, a surge of activity in designing and implementing new systems, models, and tools, often without evaluation, reflects an accelerationist belief that imagined futures can be rapidly imposed on the present. This creates a culture of “Doing is Being,” where action substitutes for reflection.

Second, the speed of policy change reshapes both objects and subjects within the care system, echoing Virilio’s claim that speed itself becomes a form of domination. The result is a proliferation of “dislocated, undeveloped ideas swirling around… at the level of great generality,” with little grounding in established human or social science perspectives.

Ubercaring is situated within the DfE’s current policy environment, characterised by compressed timelines, limited consultation, and insufficient space for critical or alternative thinking.

The initial insight emerged from noticing contradictions and unconscious dynamics in the narrative surrounding regional care cooperatives (RCCs). Influenced by Elizabeth Cotton’s Ubertherapy, NCERCC began to see regional care cooperatives as part of a broader shift toward platformised, corporatised care systems driven by data extraction and algorithmic decision‑making.

A key question animates the analysis: Whose interests are regional care cooperatives serving, and what are their intentions?

The narrative used to justify regional care cooperatives, particularly the “curve of doom” where needs outstrip funds, frames the market as failing due to profiteering and positions the regional care cooperatives as a corrective mechanism. Yet the proposed solutions emphasise short‑term, standardised, treatment‑focused placements, reduced fees, and reduced lengths of stay. This logic prioritises return on investment (ROI).

NCERCC argue that regional care cooperatives represent a deeper shift: the emergence, a system of algorithmically matched, short‑term, solution‑focused placements.

In this way Ubercaring becomes an extractive industry in its own right, mining data rather than meeting children’s needs. Examples are given to show how Ubercaring has its own priorities with nothing, or at least very little, to do with care.

The Assessment of Need Tool tender is presented as a concrete example of this trajectory: a unified digital platform designed to capture, analyse, and monetise children’s data, enabling predictive analytics and algorithmic allocation of care.

It is inescapable but to see that such platformisation aligns with monopoly capitalism, where venture capital logics reshape care into a corporatised commodity.

Algorithmic care depersonalises and deprofessionalises practice, replacing formulation‑based understanding with CBT‑style interventions derived from standardised self‑report questions. The system shifts responsibility onto individual children, families, and providers rather than addressing structural failures. Digitalisation becomes a precursor to pay‑as‑you‑go children’s care, where data—not relationships—becomes the central organising principle.

Algorithmic systems cannot grasp the nuances of children’s emotional states, panic, trauma, loss, bewilderment, and risk reducing complex human experiences to behavioural indicators. If algorithms determine care models, allocate providers, and predict outcomes, professional judgement is eroded. Biases embedded in data deepen inequalities, and the system becomes a form of data colonialism, hollowing out children’s social care by socially quantifying children’s needs.

Ubercaring is a business model, not a care model. It inhibits the ability to think about what is a care model. By denying  relational care it undermines continuity, and replaces human connection with convenience, choice, and standardisation, “care done anytime, from anywhere, by anyone.”

The document concludes by insisting that alternatives exist. To resist Ubercaring, the sector must create safe, reflective spaces for inquiry, investigation, and interrogation. Professional relational oversight and co‑design are essential.

Understanding platformisation, monopoly capitalism, and international trajectories, particularly in the USA, is necessary to reclaim care from algorithmic logics.

The need is for a perspective capable of seeing both inside and outside the system while retaining independent space for critical thought.

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