Mary Jackson, the new chief executive of Frontline, was promoted into the role after her predecessor and the organisation’s founder Josh MacAlister was asked by ministers to lead the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care in January.
Jackson, who worked for six years in the organisation’s senior team, admits it is not the easiest of tasks, taking the reigns in the middle of a global pandemic and amid scrutiny of diversity and inclusion across the social work sector.
She also faces the challenge of tackling the negative perception that some in the sector have about the fast-track training programme – namely, that Frontline has received millions of pounds of government funding but many graduates do not stay in the sector.
Jackson was instrumental in setting up Frontline’s Firstline programme, aimed at developing local authority social work managers, and is now spearheading its new programme for system leaders as well as an innovation lab.
What percentage of Frontline graduates are working in children’s social work currently?
Some 83 per cent of Frontline fellows work in children’s social work still. That could be in a range of spaces but the vast majority are in local authorities.
We will continue to monitor where they are after five years, but it’s also understanding how to best support them.
The overarching principle of our five-year strategy is to get to, in 2025, 4,000 impactful fellows. We’d love as many as are able to stay within the social work profession, that’s the nature of our work, but some of them may go into central government to help design policy and we’ve got other fellows that are working in charities.
What are your priorities for Frontline over the next year and in the longer-term?
Our five-year strategy focuses on a series of new moves as well as improving what we currently do. In terms of new moves, we are working on launching our Headline programme later this year and our innovation lab is now live.
The innovation lab is set up to ensure that we will fund those who come off our programmes, our fellows, who have any ways they think they can improve the system, whether that be in their direct work with families or in the context of local authorities, to develop those ideas.
What are the main aims, challenges and benefits of the new Headline programme?
I was involved in developing Firstline, which we’ve been running since 2015, and every single time I visited a local authority I’d get asked when we were going to do something similar for heads of service.
Leadership in all levels of social work is so important and when we spoke to a lot of people they described persistent problems that are unique to this level. It’s launching in October and the pilot will be about improving leadership skills and knowledge at that level.
In 2020, Frontline published its racial diversity and inclusion action plan. How has it been received and what are the next steps?
We have achieved all the things we set out to so we are a bit ahead of our own target. We have changed curriculum across all of our programmes and we have done training internally on anti-racism and allyship and we’ve invested in coaching and more opportunities and more support to black, Asian and minority ethnic participants and those on our programme.
I’ve been really clear since coming into the post that this is just the first step. We’ve got an internal group which is led by the senior team and we’re continuing to think about and work out how that might evolve.
You have said Frontline is “uniquely positioned to understand the sector”, so have you fed into the Care Review?
We’re likely to make a submission, I’m just not sure what yet. We’ve got a small working group internally and we’ll be gathering feedback from people on our programmes and across the organisation.
The Care Review’s Case for Change felt like a very clear breakdown of what the problems in the system are and our job at Frontline is to try and create an environment which enables children and families to get the support they need through social work, leadership and innovation – we’re aligned to the principles laid out in the Case for Change.
Frontline has been criticised by some in the sector. What are you doing to improve relations with these sceptics?
When we first set up Frontline we were doing something very different from the status quo and we were not shy about saying that. Some would say, me being one of them, that we didn’t get the messaging quite right but that was eight years ago and we have evolved a lot since then. We have great partnerships across the sector.
We work with more than half of the local authorities in the country and with them at different levels of leadership so that feels like we can be influential to bring about change in the system.
What that shows is a shared commitment and ethos is recognised in the relationships we’ve developed and are now in a very different place than what they were when we first started.
Mary Jackson CV
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January 2021 – present – Chief executive, Frontline
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2018-2021 – Chief programmes officer, Frontline
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2015-2018 – Leadership development director, Frontline
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2011-2015 – Founding director, Morning Lane Associates
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2006-2011 – Project manager, Hackney Council, working on Reclaiming Social Work programme
