The Role of CareCubed in Children’s Social Care

Few areas of public service carry greater responsibility than decisions about children’s care. Every home-finding decision involves balancing out the assessed needs of the child, their wellbeing, the available provision, and the practical realities of providing support.
As local authorities and providers continue to explore how evidence and data can support decisions, questions can often be raised about the role of benchmarking tools like CareCubed.

What does CareCubed do? What does it not do, and how should outputs be used in practice?

What Is CareCubed?

At its core, CareCubed is a benchmarking tool. Its purpose is to help commissioners and providers understand the resources and costs associated with meeting the assessed needs of a child. By providing a structured way to consider staffing, operational requirements, and other drivers of cost, it supports more transparent conversations around home-finding needs and children with disabilities support fees.

The CareCubed system has been built with input from both providers and commissioners and includes a specific data model based on children’s homes and semi-independent living provision. It focuses on the needs of children and young people and outcomes that can make a positive difference to their lives.

The intention is not to replace discussion between commissioners and providers, but to provide a straightforward evidence base and a transparent environment for those discussions which has been called for by the sector – including DfE and the National Audit Office. Rather than relying solely on historic arrangements or broad market comparisons, CareCubed aims to make the assumptions transparent and based upon real-world costs and robust data.

Just as importantly, a child’s needs are determined through professional assessment, evidence, and an understanding of their individual circumstances. CareCubed does not assess those needs, determine what they should be, or place limits on them. It does not determine what support a child requires, what setting is appropriate, or what outcomes should be pursued. These decisions sit with social workers, commissioners, clinicians, and the other professionals involved in the child’s assessment and care planning.

Throughout care, professional judgement remains central. The distinction is important as discussions about need and cost are often linked but are not the same thing.

Understanding what a child needs to feel supported is one thing, but understanding the resources required to deliver this is entirely different. CareCubed is therefore intended to support more informed and transparent conversations about the resources required to meet assessed need. It is not a substitute for professional judgement, nor is it a mechanism for determining what a child needs.

Children’s Needs Remain Central

One of the most common concerns about costing tools is whether financial considerations risk influencing decisions about care. In practice, CareCubed is intended to work in the opposite sense.

The starting point is always the assessed needs of the child. These needs inform the level of support required, including but not limited to:

• Staffing arrangements.
• Supervision requirements.
• Specialist provision.

Only then can the model estimate the likely costs associated with delivering support. The assessment of need drives the costing exercise. This principle reflects the fundamental position that children’s needs should determine the support that is required, and costing discussions should begin from this foundation.

How Are CareCubed Benchmarks Constructed?

Although there is sometimes a perception that CareCubed is based on an adult social care model applied to children’s services, the reality is much more nuanced.

CareCubed was originally developed to support highly individualised care packages for people with complex learning disabilities where support requirements can vary a great deal between individuals across a variety of situations.

The children’s services model was subsequently developed with the sector to reflect the specific characteristics of children’s care services, the operational running of children’s provision, and the resources required to meet individual needs.

This includes consideration of factors such as:

• Occupancy levels
• Staffing ratios
• Staff expertise
• Shift patterns.
• Geographic location

All these factors can be critical to a child’s care, and all will also materially affect the cost of the care provided.

The aim is not to produce a generic average, but to create an individualised benchmark that reflects the resources associated with delivering a particular level of support on a child-centred basis.

A Benchmark is Not a Price Cap

It is critical to remember that a benchmark is different from a fee. A CareCubed benchmark is intended to be an evidence point, not a predetermined answer. Every home-finding exercise for a child exists independently. This includes considerations regarding local market conditions, geographical factors, recruitment challenges, specialist services, organisational structures, and individual circumstances. All these things can influence the final cost of a provision.

For this reason, benchmark outputs should be part of the wider conversation rather than automatic conclusions. They provide transparency around cost and the drivers of cost; however, they do not remove the need for discussion, professional judgement, and negotiation. If anything, they provide a gateway to a more contextualised format for healthy negotiations and decision-making to occur.

How Providers Can Challenge Assumptions

Transparency only has value when it enables meaningful dialogue. Where providers believe that assumptions do not accurately reflect the reality of a particular individual’s care, the assumptions should be available for discussion. The visibility provided by CareCubed enables commissioners and providers to examine how costs have been derived and identify areas where local circumstances may justify differences.

In this way, CareCubed is intended to create a shared understanding and enable productive negotiations. Reasonable challenge, be it from commissioners or providers, is an especially important part of enabling fair and sustainable outcomes.

Limitations & Responsible-Use Principles

Just like any analytical tool, CareCubed has limitations. It cannot replace professional judgement, nor can it capture every local circumstance. Although information about specific settings can be submitted, agreed, and saved into the system for future use, it cannot determine the care that a child should receive or provide a definitive answer in every fee discussion. Its outputs should always be considered alongside local knowledge, provider expertise, market intelligence, and the specific circumstances of the child.

Although the CareCubed Cost of Care module cannot find the best home for the child, this capability is available in the CareCubed Brokerage module via a digital process for intelligent home-finding. This can add a further layer of support to the commissioning cycle but still requires thorough assessment of needs and understanding of the situation of the child for optimal outcomes.

 

Overall, there will always be a debate about how evidence should be used in social care commissioning; the existence of these debates is valuable. Yet it is most productive when there is a clear distinction between assessing what support a child needs and understanding the cost of providing that support.

CareCubed exists to support the comprehension of cost, and without CareCubed it is very difficult to understand a fair price and have a transparent basis for commissioners and providers to work within, but the responsibility of understanding the support needed is the responsibility of good practice and thorough decision-making.