Former social worker Janet Daby replaced by ex-Frontline chief Josh MacAlister as children's minister

Former social worker Janet Daby has been replaced by ex-Frontline chief executive Josh MacAlister as children's minister in the government reshuffle.

After being appointed to the Department for Education's ministerial team, MacAlister indicated in a LinkedIn post that he would be taking the role vacated by Daby of minister for children and families, which involves responsibility for social care. He later confirmed he had been appointed minister for children and families in a post on X.

This means he will be tasked by implementing reforms to the sector based on those he conceived through his 2021-22 Independent Review of Children's Social Care, commissioned by the previous Conservative government.

In a statement posted on X, Daby said children's minister role since Labour returned to power in July 2024, had been an "honour".

"As a former social worker, I was grateful for the opportunity to lead the profession I love dearly and to begin to introduce much-needed reforms to children's social care," she wrote.

The government’s children’s social care reforms

The reforms, some of which are being enacted through the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill and  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.

MacAlister charged with putting recommendations into practice

Many of the changes are based on recommendations on MacAlister's care review, which called for an additional £2.6bn to be invested in services over four years, principally to shift provision from late to early intervention, reducing the numbers of children in care or on child protection plans through better family support.

Following the government's spending review earlier this year, MacAlister said he believed the investment provided took funding for children's social care reform since 2023 from successive governments up to £2.6bn by 2028-29.

This includes £523m per year provided from 2025-29 to set up new family help services and multi-agency child protection teams, though only £270m a year of this was new funding, with the rest being recycled from the former Supporting Families programme.

Delivering 'positive change for the most vulnerable children'

He referred to the additional cash in his LinkedIn post, in which he said he was looking forward to delivering "big and positive change for the most vulnerable children in England".

Chancellor Rachel Reeves allocated £2.1 billion at the spending review to enact many of the reforms I called for in my review. I’m looking forward to working with the fantastic education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, the ministerial team at the DfE and colleagues from across government to deliver big and positive change for the most vulnerable children in England."

Unlike Daby, MacAlister is a teacher by background but, in 2012 turned his attention to children's social work, conceiving of a fast-track training programme for the sector similar to Teach First, through which he had trained to work in education.

Founder of Frontline 

A year later, with the support of then education secretary Michael Gove, he set up the charity Frontline to deliver on this vision, with its programme to train high-flying gradautes to work in child protection social work in just over a year starting in 2014.

The programme divided social work opinion. Advocates saw it as a way of attracting people into the profession who would not have otherwise considered social work, getting trainees into employment more quickly than could be done through two- or three-year university courses and training future leaders.

Critics saw it as elitist, undermining university social work training - including through offering more generous, government-funded financial support - promoting premature specialisation and being too close to the then Conservative government.

Fast-track scheme now embedded

However, the programme, now known as Approach Social Work, is now firmly embedded in the sector, training around cohorts of 500 graduates, who continue to qualify in just over a year, before undertaking their ASYE and then a master's in advanced relationship-based social work practice in their third year.

And though some of the criticisms of it surfaced when the Conservatives appointed MacAlister to lead the care review in 2021, his appointment, and his eventual recommendations, were broadly welcomed by sector bodies.

He will now get a chance, as a Labour minister, to put those recommendations into practice and oversee a shift in the focus of children's social care that he and many others have argued is so necessary.