Jacqui Smith reappointed minister for skills

Jacqui Smith has been reappointed as skills minister in prime minister Andy Burnham’s government, retaining her joint role across the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions.

Number 10 confirmed Baroness Smith’s reappointment as a DfE and DWP minister this evening. FE Week understands she will retain the skills brief she has held since July 2024.

She will continue to work across two departments, responsible for apprenticeships and adult skills at DWP and 16-19 further education and higher education at the Department for Education.

Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden was reappointed yesterday. Burnham appointed Lucy Powell to replace Bridget Phillipson as education secretary.

Alongside McFadden, Smith’s reappointment provides some continuity as ministers battle stubbornly high youth unemployment. She will also play a key role in Burnham’s pledge for parity of status between academic and technical learning across the education system.

Before becoming prime minister, Burnham clashed with Smith over skills devolution while serving as mayor of Greater Manchester. He called DfE his “biggest frustration” and warned that its resistance to giving mayors greater control of skills funding risked becoming “anti-growth”.

Smith later acknowledged “tension” with mayors and said there was potential to devolve more, but ruled out handing them full control of 16-to-19 funding.

Fellow DfE minister Georgia Gould and DWP minister Andrew Western have also been reappointed, though their portfolios have not been confirmed.

As Smith sits in the House of Lords, ministers from DfE and DWP who are MPs respond to further education and skills-related questions in the House of Commons.

For DfE, that role had fallen to Josh MacAlister. He has so far not been given a government job. For DWP, that role has been shared between McFadden and Western.

Smith is the only Lords minister at the DfE, meaning she is also responsible for representing all of the department’s policy areas in the upper chamber.

Smith and Burnham previously served together in Gordon Brown’s cabinet between 2007 and 2009, when she was home secretary and he held posts including chief secretary to the Treasury and culture secretary.

Phillipson meanwhile remains in cabinet as minister for women and equalities. In a machinery of government change announced earlier today, the equalities office was moved to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Elsewhere, former defence secretary John Healey was appointed chancellor of the exchequer yesterday. Healey served as adult skills minister between 2001 and 2002, his first government post, before moving to the Treasury.