Josh MacAlister - National Children and Adult Services Conference
Speech delivered by Children's Minister at annual NCASC conference in Liverpool
4 PM Wednesday 11 November 2026, Liverpool Experience Campus
I know many of you in this room. You are friends and colleagues. And I know that building this momentum has been years in the making.
This momentum has been built by the people in this room. By social workers who keep showing up for families. By leaders who carry enormous responsibility, often without recognition. And by people across the sector who have refused to accept that better outcomes for children are beyond our reach.
That matters to me. Because lasting reform won’t come from central government alone. It will come from the experience, judgement and determination of the people in this room, working together with government to reset children’s social care and achieve lasting change for the children and families of this country.
I have seen this momentum recently with the launch of our first national campaign.
Momentum to change children’s social care, for the children and families we serve.
The changes you are leading to improve our fostering system will mean we have 10,000 more homes for children in care.
When I was here with you last year, there was no fostering action plan, no campaign, no end-to-end hubs, no new rulebook for fostering, and only two Regional Care Cooperatives. Two thirds of the country are now in Regional Care Cooperatives. In one year, a lot has changed and changed for the better!
I am here to say that because of this momentum, momentum that you have created, we are at a moment of enormous opportunity.
The Milburn review.
The ‘Rewiring the State’ framework.
And the 10 Year Plan.
Taken together, these documents will set a direction for our country.
But, I want to let you in on a secret.
Much of what is in these documents reflects the reforms that are now well underway within children’s social care that you are leading. Our part of the public sector isn’t often at the vanguard. But this time we are.
These forthcoming publications will spell out reforms to public services that share the principles that we have been using to change children’s social care these last few years:
- Making the public more powerful
- Shifting from crisis to prevention
- Promoting expertise for practitioners
- Hardwiring collaboration between services
Because we have already been working to these principles, we have the opportunity to be the proof point for the whole of government.
To show what is possible when we rewire public services well. Better work for practitioners. Better value for taxpayers.
And most important of all, better outcomes for children and families who are often caught in crisis.
So let me set out for each of these principles, the successes so far and the next set of challenges we face.
Power to the public
Perhaps more so than in other public services, social care can disempower families. That’s why making the public more powerful in how children’s social care is delivered is so important. More power for children, families, family networks, young care experienced adults and the communities they call home.
Perhaps the most visible sign of this rewiring is the dramatic expansion of Family Group Decision Making and Family Network Support Packages that we are seeing, following the passage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act and the implementation of the Families First programme.
The idea was always simple.
But it has frequently been snuffed out by a system that too often saw families as the problem and not the solution.
Rolling out Family Group Decision Making and
Family Network Support packages marks a decisive break from this, shifting real power and spending towards those who know children best.
We have made a solid start.
In Walsall, for example, providing practical support through an FNSP helped one child to avoid foster care and return to their parent’s care.
And this isn’t an isolated example -
Walsall has delivered more than 150 Family Network Support Packages this year, showing their potential to support families at scale.
The next challenge?
What would it take to shift hundreds of millions of pounds of spending away from the care system and into family systems under Family Network Support Packages?
We know that there are big and strong family networks out there today that our system didn’t do enough to support. And the price of this disempowerment is fractured relationships for children and, inevitably, higher costs for crisis intervention.
Shift from crisis to prevention
This is where prevention comes in.
In children’s social care, we are still on the crisis spend escalator.
We always knew that breaking this powerful force would require discipline, determination and double run funding. And that’s what has shaped every action I’ve taken to ensure we deliver Families First.
Like the challenge facing so many public services, we cannot afford to leave this doom loop of escalating crisis costs unbroken. It is a financial imperative – this year again saw a further shift away from intensive family support towards care costs.
But it is also a moral urgency. Each pound financing an increasingly privatised care market, depletes intensive family support. It is gradually eroding a key lever of social justice. It cannot stand.
That is why effectively implementing our £2.4 billion Families First Partnership programme is of such outsized importance.
The programme and the funding gives us a generational chance to build back intensive family support work.
And we are seeing signs across England that this recovery for intensive help, for Family Help, is reversing the escalator.
I saw this first-hand in Blackburn With Darwen today.
They are investing in additional specialist expertise as part of their Family Help model - including domestic abuse and substance misuse services, employment support, health teams and support for young carers.
By investing in earlier expertise, families can get the right help more quickly.
And encouragingly, they are seeing fewer children progress to Child Protection.
The challenge now is to ensure your services make every pound of FFP funding count, and that you lock-in avoided care costs to fund permanently higher levels of Family Help spending.
Let me be explicit for the council chief executives and finance directors – this is the only way we will break the cost escalator that is entrenching social injustice and jeopardising local government finance.
Building Expertise
Shifting this spending only works if we build up the expertise of those practitioners working with children and families.
This is why the new National Professional Development Offer matters so much. It represents the largest single investment in post-qualifying training for social workers. A comprehensive set of programmes to deepen the knowledge and skill of those recently qualified, those taking on the new Lead Child Protection Practitioner or Family Help team manager roles, and those leading our services.
This new programme is about more than training.
It is part of new deal from central government – real investment in professional development to build expertise, so we can reduce bureaucracy and process that stems from a lack of trust in practice.
We have been on a steady march towards greater expertise and rigour in our work. Family Finding practice has benefitted enormously from the rigour of models like Lifelong Links. I will be setting-out shortly the details for the national sprint to get this quality of Family Finding practice everywhere as soon as possible.
That sits within our wider Enduring Relationships Strategy, bringing our reforms together around a shared purpose to build and protect children’s relationships, so they can feel safe and loved.
And for the first time, we will measure whether children in care actually have those enduring relationships in their lives.
One of the next challenges is to start building greater expertise in our residential care system.
We need a smaller and more purposeful role for residential care in England.
But this will only be possible with investment and support for practitioners working in children’s homes, so that they can provide a genuinely therapeutic experience for children with the greatest needs.
I recently returned from Denmark where I was able to see what a more rigorous model of residential care could offer children. Emmanuel Akpan-Inwang’s report will be published soon, and I will use this to set-out the blueprint for the future of residential care.
Hardwiring collaboration
Finally, if we are rewiring public services to work for the contradictions, complexity and expectations of families, we must hardwire collaboration across different services.
I know how hard this can be. But things are shifting.
The Department for Education’s SEND reforms put this centre stage. So too will the government’s response to Milburn’s review.
And in children’s social care, we are well underway with building new Multi-Agency Child Protection Teams - bringing together professionals from health, policing, social work and education is already showing positive results.
We’re learning a great deal from areas already delivering MACPTs.
Gloucestershire is a proof point. Colleagues from the local authority, policing, health and education described the impact of daily collaboration, information sharing, and building trusted relationships across agencies.
They demonstrated how shared decision-making meant decisive action to achieve greater safety for children.
But there is so much more we need to do.
Last month I announced a new collaborative initiative - Care Together. Covering up to 7,000 young people and families in Greater Manchester, it will test fully-integrating mental health clinicians into children’s social care teams, so we can do away with gate-keeping and bouncing people back and forth, and instead offer immediate expert help.
We are also introducing Home Again, our model to provide children at greatest risk to themselves and others with a single, coordinated plan and package of intensive help that brings together social care, health, education, and youth justice.
The new Regional Care Cooperatives in Cheshire & Merseyside, West Midlands and Greater London will be the first to rollout this approach. This should show that fewer children are deprived of their liberty by fusing acute services together to do the intensive work needed to help these children and their families.
All these programmes prioritise shared responsibility, early action and continuity around the child’s family - rather than repeated referral between services.
And it won’t end there.
Collaboration to transform outcomes for care-experienced young people needs to happen at all levels of government.
Care-experienced young people are far more likely to be NEET than their peers.
So I’m working with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to ensure that measures that come out of the Millburn review will boost opportunities for those leaving care.
Power. Prevention. Expertise. Collaboration.
The principles we are baking into the reform of children’s social care.
Reforms you are delivering, that offer a way marker for the rewiring of the public realm.
Material progress is being made that will be felt by families.
Now is the chance to pull together so we can go further. To accelerate and deepen these changes so that the momentum we have created can grow even stronger, and become irreversible.
I will continue to be with you on this journey.
To champion and challenge you, so that we reset children’s social care and achieve the lasting positive change that so many children, families and care-experienced adults need.
Thank you.