News update
This article was written before Janet Daby left the government and was replaced as children's minister by Josh MacAlister. We will update this article and the details for the relevant Community Care Live session as soon as we have updated information.The former social worker will discuss the government's reforms to children's social care, including those being legislated for through its Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, and how it is supporting and celebrating the profession.
Daby's speech takes place on day one of the two-day, free event for social care professionals, which runs from 7-8 October at the Business Design Centre, London.
She became children's minister in July 2024, shortly after Labour took power, in a move greeted warmly by the sector as a result of her background as a fostering social worker and a registered manager of an independent fostering agency.
In her role, Daby has spearheaded the government's children's social care reforms - which are largely inherited from its Conservative predecessor - and the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is putting some of the changes into law.
The government's children's social care reforms
The reforms include:- The establishment of multidisciplinary family help teams to provide families with complex needs with earlier, less stigmatising support, designed to ensure they can keep their families with them.
- The creation of multi-agency child protection teams, staffed by specialist practitioners, to ensure children at risk are better protected.
- A duty on councils to offer families a family group decision making meeting prior to care proceedings to enable the extended family to come up with their own plan to safeguard the child.
- Powers for the government to require councils to form regional care co-operatives to commission and deliver care placements, to help ensure sufficient high-quality local placements for children.
- Investment to build and refurbish children's homes, in order to increase capacity, and support for councils to recruit more foster carers.
- Legislation setting rules on councils' use of agency workers in children's social care services, to curb their use and improve continuity of support for children and families.
- New post-qualifying standards for children's social workers, with the likely replacement of the assessed and supported year in employment (ASYE) by a two-year programme, to improve support for children's practitioners at the start of their careers.
What’s on offer at Community Care Live 2025
Registering for Community Care Live gives you access to over 20 sessions on topics such as improving responses to intra-familial child sexual abuse, supporting kinship families, learning from safeguarding adults reviews, working with adults with executive functioning challenges and coercive control.You can also sign up for our eight paid-for legal sessions, which cover the reformed Mental Health Act, the deprivation of liberty of children and young people, hoarding and mental capacity and family court cases involving parents with learning disabilities, among other subjects.
Besides Daby, speakers at this year’s event include:
- Chief social workers Isabelle Trowler (children and families) and Sarah McClinton (adults);
- Jahnine Davis, the DfE’s national kinship care ambassador and expert on the safeguarding of black children;
- Tim Spencer-Lane, specialist adult social care, mental health and mental capacity lawyer and Community Care Inform legal editor;
- Anna Glinski, deputy director for knowledge and practice development at the Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse;
- Michael Preston-Shoot, emeritus professor of social work at the University of Bedfordshire and adult safeguarding expert;
- Alex Ruck Keene, barrister at 39 Essex Chambers and expert on the Mental Capacity Act 2005.
Besides the learning, you can also network and explore new opportunities in our exhibition, which includes social work employers, providers, publishers, learning organisations and workforce bodies.
