Natalie Cassidy returns to study after caring for her father

Natalie Cassidy will step back into education in a new BBC and Open University series that begins on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on Monday 25 May 2026, using her own experience of caring for her father as the starting point for a wider look at Britain’s care system.

Natalie Cassidy: Caring Together follows the EastEnders actor as she studies Health and Social Care while balancing family life and work. The series is inspired by the time Cassidy spent supporting her father, Charles Cassidy, through end-of-life care at home. Cassidy has said the final moments with him were “breathtakingly hard” but meaningful, a reminder that the emotional toll of care often lands first on families long before it reaches any formal service.

That personal story arrives against a strained national backdrop. Skills for Care said adult social care in England contributed £77.8 billion to the economy in 2024/25, underlining how central the sector is to daily life and the wider labour market. Yet the same data showed around 111,000 vacancies across adult social care, with an overall vacancy rate of 7.0 per cent and a sharper 9.7 per cent in domiciliary care, where workers support people in their own homes.

The care workforce pressure is not just a staffing statistic. The Care Quality Commission has said vacancy rates in adult social care are three times higher than in the wider job market, while demand for local authority-funded social care support continued to rise in 2023/24. Taken together, those figures point to a system that is being asked to do more with fewer trained staff, even as more families rely on it to manage illness, ageing and the final stages of life.

Cassidy’s return to study gives that strain a human face. Her experience caring for Charles Cassidy, who died in 2021 aged 84, reflects a familiar reality for thousands of families who must learn, improvise and endure at the same time. By pairing a celebrity name with classroom study and end-of-life care at home, the new series is set to ask a broader question: whether Britain’s care system is giving families enough support, or simply expecting them to shoulder the gap.