The online resource for professionals working with children and families
30/04/2013
About Community Care Inform
Types of information available
- Guides
- Case law
- Digested legislation
- Research
- A-Z of benefits
- Country profiles
Where does our information come from?
Our commissioning, expert checking and updating process
How can I influence the development of the site?
Meet our expert contributors
About Community Care Inform
Community Care Inform is published by Reed Business Information, the publisher of communitycare.co.uk. It has been built with and for social workers and other professionals who work with children, young people and their families. The overall aim of the site is to improve standards of practice by equipping practitioners with the information they need to confidently make informed decisions and assessments; stay on top of the latest guidance, good practice, research, legislation and case law; and to actively expand their knowledge base by learning through case work.
The Inform team work closely with practitioners who use the service to ensure it continues to grow and develop in line with the changing information needs of the profession. Users are encouraged to be active stakeholders in determining what new information is commissioned and what new functionality is developed.
Hundreds of hand-picked expert practitioners, researchers, academics and policy makers from social care, education, health have contributed to Inform.
Types of information available
Every document published on Inform is categoried into a type of information. The types of information are: Reference manuals, Case law, Legislation, Guides, Research, Practice and Key Documents. When you do a search on the site, either by keyword or by using the browse menu, the search results will be divided up into these categories under a series of blue tabs, enabling you to find what you are looking for really quickly.
Guides
Our guides section is designed to give you up-to-date, practical guidance to support the decisions you make in everyday practice.
In this section you will find our uniquely-commissioned reference manuals and guides to a wide range of practice-related topics (our guide to… series).
Reference manuals: Each reference manual provides you with an authoritative document containing highly relevant information, containing:
Written for social care professionals by nationally-respected experts in their particular field, reference manuals are regularly updated by their authors. The last updated date is clearly displayed on the documents and in the search results so you can exercise judgement about how you use the information. Reference manuals are subjected to a rigorous quality-assurance process before they are published to the site: each one is written by an expert, anonymously peer reviewed by another expert, and then reviewed by a social care lawyer prior to publication.
Guide to… series: There are over 360 expert-written guides in the series covering a wide range of topics from preparing for court and non-accidental head injuries to working with children and families from overseas. They are designed to help you in your day-to-day practice by giving you a greater understanding of a particular issue, condition or process; and to give you the information you need to properly take account of a particular aspect of a case.
Case law
Case law summaries are typically written for a legal audience which can make them difficult for practitioners to use in a meaningful way in their practice. Inform works with a leading legal publisher, Lexis Nexis, to give Inform subscribers access to case law summaries that are written for professionals working in social care. New case law summaries are regularly published to the site as judgements are made in English and Welsh courts. It usually takes between two and four weeks for original case law transcripts to be re-written to Inform's template, checked and published to the site.
Digested legislation
Shortened, simplified versions of the legislation that affects children and families across England and Wales. Each piece of digested legislation is accompanied by an overview giving practitioners a guide to the most important sections of the Act. The digested legislation will also include links to all the relevant guidance associated with it.
Inform’s legislation section is overseen by Ed Mitchell, general editor of Social Care Law Today.
Research
Inform keeps subscribers up to date with research information in two important ways:
1) Inform commissions academics to write Research Reviews on their area of specialism. The aim of these documents is to give users an overview of research in the area of practice. They are designed to give users:
- a summary of the key findings of research;
- what these findings might mean for practice and decision-making
- a sense of perspective about which findings seem to be consistent, and which are contested.
- some ideas about further reading, and...
- a few words of caution about how to use the information.
2) Inform monitors and provides links to research information coming out of government departments, universities and voluntary sector organisations. These research documents are categorised as either: Government Research; Research Study or University Research and are returned under the 'Research' tab along with Research Reviews. You can filter your search results by clicking on the type of research you're looking for in the drop-down 'Research Type' menu in top right-hand corner of the screen. Inform provides a brief synopsis of what the research is about with a link through to the full text of the document, which will open in a new window.
A-Z of benefits
A comprehensive guide to the benefits relevant to children and their families. Regularly updated and user-friendly, subscribers can click through to the benefit they want where they will find a detailed guide on who the benefit is for, who pays it, how to claim and points to watch. Written by Gary Vaux, a leading welfare rights expert.
Country profiles
Inform has published a series of guides which help practitioners prepare themselves for working with families from overseas. There are currently 50 countries covered (and more in the pipeline). They give practitioners the background information they need to work with a child, young person or family from these countries with confidence. All the country profile guides follow the same format and provide information on:
Where does our information come from?
Unlike any other online social care library, the vast majority of the content on Inform is specially written by expert authors. The editorial team identify authors with appropriate specialisms and commission them to write authoritative, accessible and up-to-date reference material.
Reference manuals, Guide to's... , and Research reviews are all individually commissioned from experts in their field.
Our Case law is produced in partnership with Lexis Nexis. Case judgements are collected by barristers and rewritten - specifically for a non-legal professional audience -by an expert legal team. New cases are added to our database on a regular basis, keeping our case-law library completely up to date.
Our Digested legislation is produced and updated by a team of lawyers headed by Ed Mitchell, editor of the journal Social Care Law Today.
Our Benefits directory is produced and kept up to date by a Welfare Rights expert, Gary Vaux.
Our commissioning, expert checking and updating process
Authors are contacted individually and commissioned to write specific pieces. They are given a deadline and expected to meet it. The editorial team reviews the document and returns it for changes where necessary.
Authors of Reference Manuals and some other types of information have made a commitment to update their piece when there are notable and significant changes in their field. This might include new legislation or guidance being published, a change in a professional's key responsibilities, or a major initiative being launched.
How do I influence the development of Community Care Inform?
The editorial team are knowledgeable about social care, but we can't know everything. In fact, Inform was built in partnership with a development team of children and families professionals from a variety of disciplines. We continue to value their input, and to act on their advice. We would warmly welcome your comments about the content, suggestions for development and constructive criticism.
Please use the Contact Us form to share your ideas or give us feedback.
Meet our expert contributors
Inform has worked with many of the leading experts in the social care field. Scroll down to see the biographies of some of the experts who have contributed to the information on the site.
Ian Angus
Ian Angus is an independent safeguarding children consultant. Having recently worked as the Training and Development Manager for Bedfordshire's Local Safeguarding Children Board, and having worked for 30 years with the Metropolitan Police Service (most recently as Detective Chief Inspector), Ian has a strong investigative background with over 13 years experience in child abuse investigation, management and policy development. Ian has also worked with the London Child Protection Committee on pan-London initiatives such as the London Child Protection Procedures, Inter-agency Training, and safeguarding children from sexually exploitation. Having a key role in implementing 'every child matters' in London, Ian contributed significantly to a number of projects including Violet (preventing belief-related child abuse) and Amethyst (developing a children's Sexual Assault Referral Centre). With a Masters degree in Child Law and Policy, Ian maintains an academic interest in safeguarding children and contributes to national discourse on topical issues.
Dr Jo Aldridge
Jo Aldridge is professor of social policy in the department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University. She is also director of the Young Carers Research Group (YCRG), which is known both in the UK and internationally for its pioneering research on young carers. For more information about the YCRG visit: www.ycrg.org.uk
Janice AllisterJanice has worked for 18 years (the past 15 full-time) as a partner in a small practice in Stockport. She is currently serving as Chair of the Primary Child Care Safeguarding Forum. She has been involved since its inception two years ago, and was previously its secretary. Janice has been a GP trainer for the last 9 years. Her particular interests are in mental health and children’s welfare. Her practice received the Quality Practice Award two years ago.
Dr Shazad AminDr Shazad Amin is a consultant in adult psychiatry and director of medical education based at Trafford General Hospital in Manchester.
He trained in Manchester and undertook his psychiatric training in Nottingham. He has an interest in medical and social work education and runs regular training courses for CAFCASS on a regional and national basis. He teaches in parental mental health on the PGDip/MA Advanced Practice and Leadership in Social Work course at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a member of the Greater Manchester Family Justice Board and the Greater Manchester Family Courts Forum Expert Group, and acts as an expert witness in family court proceedings. He is also a medical member of the GMC Medical Tribunals Service Fitness to Practice Panels.
He is a passionate believer in multi-disciplinary education and training, and in making psychiatric expert evidence more understandable and accessible to the family courts and professionals working with children.
Dr Elias AvaramidisDr Elias Avramidis is a Senior Lecturer in Special Educational Needs (SEN) in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Exeter. His research mainly focuses on examining the theory and practice of inclusive education and the barriers to its implementation. His research (covering primary, secondary and tertiary settings) has sought to identify effective policies and pedagogies to address the needs of children and adults described as experiencing learning difficulties. He has published on topics such as the theory and practice of inclusion; teachers’ attitudes towards inclusive education; the identification of and provision for children with difficulties in literacy; and research methodology issues. He is currently director of a large ESRC-funded research project examining the social impacts of inclusion on pupils with SEN in primary schools. His work has been widely disseminated in a range of national and international fora to inform policy-making and practice.
Simone Baker
Simone Baker was born with impairments resulting from Thalidomide and lives with her ten year old daughter in Reading, Berkshire. She is vice-chair of Disabled Parents Network, a national user-led organisation providing support, information and advice to disabled parents. Her involvement with the organisation began in 1998 following an unsuccessful attempt to obtain support in her parenting role.
She became determined to bring about change for disabled parents. As well as being involved in many voluntary and fee paid roles (including chair of her local Physical Disability and Sensory Needs Partnership Board), Simone has written and contributed to a number of published articles relating to her impairment and experiences as a disabled parent. She regularly makes presentations at national and local events, and is involved with training around the issues affecting disabled parents. Simone has been a user of Direct Payments for four and-a-half years.
Lucy BaileyLucy’s current role is to lead the development and management of the UK Resilience Programme (UKRP) in Hertfordshire and support other Local Authorities to implement the UKRP across the UK. Lucy is passionate about the UKRP and is currently teaching the UKRP in a local secondary school.
Lucy has worked in Hertfordshire since 1999, starting as a part-time Youth Worker while completing her degree in Social Policy and Criminology and raising her 2 boys. Lucy joined the Young People’s Substance Misuse Team in 2001 and progressed to become the Policy and Development Manager for the Hertfordshire Young People’s Substance Misuse Partnership. Lucy’s responsibilities included developing new initiatives in response to Government legislation and changing priorities across a countywide and regional remit and managing the implementation and monitoring of the Hertfordshire Young People’s Substance Misuse Plan.
Lucy has substantial experience of project management, development in children services, workforce reform and integrated partnership working.
Robin BalbernieRobin Balbernie is currently Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist in Gloucestershire CAMHS. For two days a week he works with the Children’s Centres in Cheltenham, as lead of the team providing an Infant Mental Health Service, known as ‘Secure Start’. He is also involved in work with the Intensive Baby Care Unit at Gloucester Royal Hospital and has been running supervision groups for Health Visitors for over 20 years. He has a special interest in early interventions, originally arising from his work with adopted children, and is on the committee of the Association of Infant Mental Health (UK) and a member of the Young Minds’ Policy and Strategy Advisory Group. Several years ago he was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travelling Fellowship to look at Infant Mental Health projects in America. He has published papers in many journals, including the Infant Mental Health Journal and the Journal of Child Psychotherapy.
Kevin BallKevin Ball has worked with the NSPCC Consultancy Services, as a part – time Senior Consultant, since April 2008. The Consultancy Service works with local authorities, central and local government, the voluntary and commercial sectors as well as Local Safeguarding Children Boards assisting the development of best practice as well as undertaking a range of projects relating to safeguarding children. He also has a limited independent consultancy practice and is currently working with a county level LSCB as an Independent Children’s Safeguarding Adviser. Prior to these posts he was an Allegations Management Adviser, appointed by the DCFS as part of a small national network of AMAs, based in the Government Office South East. He worked across ten authorities within the region to support LSCBs in the development of a safer children’s workforce through the implementation of the allegations management guidance, and allied issues, as detailed in Working Together to Safeguard Children (2006).
Prior to being seconded to this post, Kevin was a Regulation Inspector with the Commission for Social Care Inspection, based in West Sussex, regulating and inspecting children’s services which included children’s homes, fostering services, special residential schools and independent boarding schools. Before becoming an Inspector Kevin held the post of a local authority Team Manager, Child Protection Team, having previously been a Senior Social Worker for a number of years in child protection/assessment teams. He also has extensive experience working in local authority, voluntary and private sectors of residential child care field.
Kevin holds an MA Child Care Law and Practice, BA (Honours) Social Work Studies, Post Graduate Diploma in Child Forensic Studies, Advanced Award in Social Work and has undertaken additional training in Achieving Best Evidence in investigative interviewing with children. He is also registered with the General Social Care Council.
Joy BarlowJoy Barlow is the head of STRADA (Scottish Training – Drugs and Alcohol). Prior to developing STRADA, she was responsible for the design, development and management of residential and outreach treatment services for substance-dependent women and their children. In 1998, she was awarded an MBE for services to innovative drug prevention and treatment initiatives.
Joy has written extensively on the impact of parental substance misuse on children and families and was a long-standing member of the Advisory Council on the
Misuse of Drugs at the Home Office, during which she worked on the ‘Hidden Harm – responding to the needs of children of problem drug users’ inquiry report.
Joy is responsible for the development of protocols to support the implementation of the safeguarding children’s agenda related to drug and alcohol misuse for a number of local authorities in Scotland. She has advised both the Scottish Government and other UK national bodies on the implementation of the ‘Hidden Harm’ report. She has also recently edited a book titled ‘Substance Misuse- the implications of research, policy and practice’.
In addition, Joy is involved in the development of the workforce in the recovery focus, writing and frequently presenting on issues relating to workforce development. She is a founder member and previous chair of I-ThETA (International Think-tank on Education and Training on Addictions), which is an international collaboration focussing on needs assessment, programme development and evaluation of both continuous professional development and academic courses. She has a masters research degree in Advanced Professional Development from the University of Edinburgh.
She was a prime mover in the Independent Enquiry Report – Melting the iceberg of Scotland’s drug and alcohol problem, and is currently supervising work on the ‘proof of concept’ of the Circle of Care approach, a recommendation from the enquiry report.
Christine BarterChristine Barter is a NSPCC Research Fellow at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol. Previously she was a Senior NSPCC Research Fellow with the University of Luton for nine years. Prior to this she undertook a variety of research projects for a number of UK children’s charities. She has published widely on a range of Children's welfare issues including children who run away, protecting young people from racism and racial abuse, boys use of advice and counselling services and institutional child abuse. She has also authored a number of methodological papers on including young people within social research. Her most recent publication explored young people’s experiences of peer violence in residential children’s homes funded by the ESRC under its Violence Research Programme (Barter et al 2004). Currently her work focuses on the neglected area of young people’s experiences of partner exploitation and violence in their intimate relationships. She is also co-editing a book on peer violence between children and young people entitled 'Children Behaving Badly?' for Wiley.
Catherine BartonCatherine Barton has over 30 years experience of working in the voluntary and statutory sector. After qualifying as a social worker and working in a local authority, she worked for the Children’s Society where she set up and developed a short break service for disabled children and their families. She is currently a trustee for Shared Care Network. She has experience of developing policy at both a national and local level, and contributed to the Westminster review of services for disabled children and their families in 2006. Catherine is the former director of Care Co-ordination Network UK (CCNUK) and maintains an interest and enthusiasm for improving the life chances of disabled children and their families. She is a C4EO disability sector specialist and currently working with the City of York, developing their short breaks provision.I live in York with my family.
Tim BatemanTim Bateman is a senior policy development officer in Nacro’s youth crime section and a visiting research fellow at the University of Bedfordshire where he co-directs a Professional Doctorate in Youth Justice. Tim is an associate editor of Safer Communities and a member of the editorial boards of Youth justice and Child and Family Law Quarterly. He is secretary of the London Association for Youth Justice and represents Nacro on the Standing Committee for Youth Justice.
Tim has written widely on a broad range of youth justice related issues but has a particular interest in systematic determinants of custody, and the relationship between politics, policy formation and the cultural and attitudinal presumptions of youth justice practice.
Kay BellKay Jennifer Bell is a registered social worker, qualified since 1986, and has worked for several years in local authorities in both practitioner and senior management roles. Kay also has experience of working within government departments, including the Department for Education & Skills (now the Department for Education) and Department of Health.
Kay is an experienced safeguarding adviser; her last post was in the pan-London Safeguarding Children Board on a variety of London-wide and borough specific projects. She has also written articles for the Child Abuse Review and has featured in social care media including Community Care and Children &Young People Now. More recently, Kay has been appointed as independent chair for the Royal Borough of Greenwich Local Safeguarding Children Board.
Bridget BettsBridget Betts qualified as a social worker in 1980, and she has held a variety of posts in both the statutory and voluntary sectors during the course of her career. Bridget has worked in the field of adoption and fostering for the past 17 years, and her role has included the training and preparation of carers and the preparation of children for permanence and adoption, including the completion of life story work. Bridget brings to this area her own experience as an adopted person. Since April 1999 Bridget has worked as an independent social worker; she currently works on a freelance basis as a trainer and consultant for a number of agencies. Bridget has produced three interactive CDs for use with children, one film and two books and is working on further resources. You can find out more on her website www.bridgetbetts.co.uk
Kim BevanKim was the Assistant Director for the Early Support Programme – the central government mechanism to improve the quality, consistency and coordination of services for young disabled children and their families across England. Previously, she was Director of an inclusion charity in Wales and has worked for many years in the field of inclusion, as a manager, practitioner, a trainer and a consultant. She was the lead for the Connexions national training programme and has developed a wide range of inclusion qualifications, in inclusion management and for practitioners working with young people with behavioural and learning difficulties and disabilities. Kim is a Chartered Psychologist, with her heart still in the field of Psychology – she has been a researcher investigating word recognition and reading and the impact of hearing loss on communication. She was also an Assistant Principal in a Sixth Form College. Kim has been a freelance consultant for the last three years, working in the field of disability and social inclusion management.
Tracey BignallTracey is currently the senior policy and practice officer with the Race Equality Foundation. She has undertaken research within the social care field, primarily on disability issues, and is co-author of several reports, including Between ambition and achievement: The views of young black disabled people on independent living and Something to do. Other research has explored the implementation of family group conferences and the career development of senior black managers in social services.
She is currently working on the Overarching Strategic Partnership Programme funded by the Department for Education, to improve outcomes for children, young people and families, as well as a range of health and housing issues.
Tracey is also currently a member of the HealthWatch England Advisory Group, the Neighbourhood Approaches to Loneliness advisory group, National BAME Transplant Association (NBTA) , and National Institute for Health Research Satisfaction with Social Care Services amongst BME populations.
Dr Chris Bools
Dr Chris Bools is a consultant in child and adolescent psychiatry who works as a member of an NHS community team based in a family health centre. Over the last 20 years he has maintained an interest in the interface between physical and psychiatric disorders. Early work included research about the identification of psychiatric disorders in children who did not attend school, and later about children and their families in which fabricated or induced illness had occurred. Recent work has focused on multi-disciplinary education and training. He organises the local training scheme in child and adolescent psychiatry. He is married and has two children.
Helen Boothman Helen’s current job title is Cognitive Behavioural Therapist for the NHS. She works part time at the Substance Misuse Service in Bradford City centre (Bradford and Airedale PCT) counselling and preparing prescriptions, preparing treatment / care plans for drug dependent patients over the age of 18. Helen also works part time at The One Stop Clinic at Bradford Royal Infirmary (NHS teaching hospital) providing CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), preparing treatment/care plans, carrying out staff and student training and writing policies and procedures for the service for drug / alcohol dependent pregnant women. Helen has a BA Hons degree in Pscyhology and Business Management from Leeds University (2001) and has recently (2008) finished and passed a Master's (MSc) degree in Applied Psychology from the University of Manchester. Helen is currently undertaking a graduate diploma in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy at York University. She is also a member of BABCP (British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies).
Jake BowersJake Bowers is Britain's only Romani journalist and broadcaster. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Independent, BBC Radio and Television, the Big Issue, Travellers Times and the Ecologist on environmental and minority rights issues. He trained as a staff journalist with the BBC and one of Britain's biggest regional publishers Johnson Publishing.
He combines a journalist’s respect for the truth, with a Gypsies access and insight into his own community to conduct research and cultural awareness training for central and local government, statutory agencies, voluntary groups and the media. He is also the editor of Travellers Times Online and Gypsy, Roma Traveller History Month magazine.
Leandra BoxLeandra manages the Strengthening Families Strengthening Communities Team. Leandra's publications include Supportive Services, Effective Strategies (1997, co-authored with Jabeer Butt); Family Centred: A study of the use of family centres by black families (1998, co-authored with Jabeer Butt); Respect : Learning materials for social care staff working with black and minority ethnic older people (1999, co-authored with Jabeer Butt and Suzanne Lyn-Cook); and a series of policy papers on the needs of black and minority ethnic families. Leandra was involved in adapting the Strengthening Families, Strengthening Communities Parent Programme for use with black and minority ethnic communities in the UK, and in developing the group based programme for young people.
Nick BozicNick Bozic is a chartered educational psychologist who works for Worcestershire Local Authority Children’s Services. He regularly carries out assessment work with children and young people. Nick works within a multidisciplinary team that is co-located with teams of social care professionals. Since 2004 Nick has also worked as an academic and professional tutor on the University of Birmingham’s training course for educational psychologists. On the training course Nick teaches sessions on the theory and use of standardised tests. Other areas of interest include: community psychology and the use of e-learning in higher education.
Celia BrackenridgeCelia is Professor of Sport Sciences (Youth Sport) and Director of the Centre for Youth Sport and Athlete Welfare and at Brunel University, London, UK. After teacher training and degree study at Cambridge and Leeds Universities, she taught physical education in a Hampshire secondary school. She then moved into higher education for 28 years, first at Sheffield Hallam University and then at Gloucestershire University. She ran her own research-based consultancy company for four years before returning to higher education at Brunel in 2005.
Celia is a former captain of the England and Great Britain Women’s Lacrosse teams and world cup coach. She is currently working on research projects with UNICEF and with the English Football Association. Her books include: Spoilsports: Understanding and preventing sexual exploitation in sport (2001, Routledge) and Child Welfare in Football (2007, Routledge).
Ray BraithwaiteRay Braithwaite is an author and trainer specialising in ways of managing aggression and stress at work. Prior to this he worked as a social worker and social work manager for nearly 20 years. He has published numerous articles and his books include Violence at work - intervention and prevention (Radcliffe); Managing Aggression (Routledge); Turning down the heat (Pavilion) and Stress at work – a manager’s guide and Stress at work - A trainers Guide (Pavilion).Ray is a national and international speaker on these subjects and helps organisations implement policies and procedures in reducing stress, assessing and reducing risks to staff, managing aggression and responding to bullying in the workplace. His website is www.aggressionstresstraining.co.uk.
Dr Bob BroadDr Bob Broad is visiting professor at London South Bank University, in the Weeks Centre for Social Policy and Research.
Previous to this he was professor of children and families research and director of the Children and Families Research Unit at De Montfort University, Leicester. He was also director of the National Children’s Bureau’s research and evaluation department. A qualified teacher and social worker, earlier he worked in several inner London boroughs as a teacher and probation officer before becoming a lecturer at the London School of Economics and then head of policy, research and training at Rainer. He has managed, undertaken and published a large number of research studies about children looked after, leaving care, foster care, kinship care and grandparenting. He is currently undertaking, or has recently undertaken, research studies and/or reviews for the Department for Children, Schools and Families (children in transition to adulthood), Save the Children Fund (international kinship care), the Fostering Network, The Adolescent and Children’s Trust (TACT) and the Grandparents Association (publication ‘Being a grandparent: research evidence, key themes and policy recommendations’)
Karen Broadhurst
Dr Karen Broadhurst is a lecturer in Applied Social Science. Having worked as a practitioner in a range of children and families’ social work settings, she now works full-time at Lancaster University in the Department of Applied Social Science, teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate social work students. Karen also supervises a cohort of PhD students and is involved in a number of research projects in local authority and other practice settings. Her research interests are organised around the following four main themes:
1. Child welfare: help-seeking, defining and delivering family support, adoption and fostering, the law relating to children
2. Decision-making in public services
3. The practice/research relationship
4. Philosophy of Social Research
Karen has published articles in a range of national and international journals that include among others: Critical Social Policy, Child and Family Social Work and the British Journal of Sociology of Education. Karen is also book review editor for the journal: Child and Family Social Work. Her work aims to contribute to the international knowledge base that informs policy, legislation and practice in child welfare. She has a particular interest in strengthening the research/evidence base for social welfare practice and the links between academic and practice sites.
Adrienne Burgess
Adrienne Burgess has written widely on fatherhood and on couple relationships. Her book Fatherhood Reclaimed: the making of the modern father (Vermilion, 1997) helped set a new agenda on fatherhood in the UK, and has been published throughout the world. Her publications for the Fatherhood Institute include a number of research summaries including the very substantial The Costs & Benefits of Active Fatherhood: evidence and insights, Fathers and Parenting Interventions – what works?, Toolkit for Father-Inclusive Practice and Invisible Fathers: the working with young fathers resource pack.
Alan BurnellAlan Burnell is a Co-Director and Registered Manager of Family Futures – An Adoption and Adoption Support Agency. He is a Social Worker and an adopted person, a father and step father. He believes passionately that families are the best place for children to grow up in. He has spent the last 20 years working in the field of post adoption and helping with colleagues at Family Futures to develop innovative services that meet the needs of the contemporary adoptive family
Margaret BusseyMargaret Bussey is a senior social worker working in a specialist role with children with life-limiting conditions and their families. She is employed by Hull City Council and works part time within the disabled children’s team and part time in a seconded role in a multi-disciplinary team, IQUOLS (Improving Quality Of Life Services) – managed by Hull and East Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust.
She qualified in 1988 and after an initial period in a neighbourhood social work team she moved into the area of children’s disability services in 1990. She worked in the child development team and the children’s disability team before moving to her present specialist role in 2005. She holds a strong belief that social work support can make a positive contribution to the lives of families with disabled children and children with life-limiting conditions. Margaret is married, has four children and is the devoted grandma to five beautiful grandsons.
Jane ButlerJane Butler is a staff tutor with the Open University in the faculty of Health and Social Care. She also works as an independent consultant in the field of foster care, a foster panel chair and as a lay assessor with the General Medical Council.
She qualified as a social worker in 1989, and most of her career has been in social work with children looked after, working in both the statutory and voluntary sectors. From 2002-2007 she was the Director for Wales of the Fostering Network (the leading charity for all those involved in foster care). In 2004, together with Anne Collis, she wrote a report entitled Fit to Foster based on a survey of foster carers and fostering services across Wales.
She has written on the subject of family and friends foster care and long-term foster care, and has helped the Fostering Network develop their policy document Fostering Families: supporting sons and daughters of foster carers.
Martin C CalderMartin C Calder (MA, CQSW) has worked in the field of child protection and child welfare for more than 20 years. He has operated as a specialist child protection social worker, child protection co-ordinator and latterly as operations manager for the Child Protection Unit with Salford City Council, where he also has responsibility for domestic violence services. Martin is moving into independent practice and has founded Calder Training and Consultancy to develop further evidence-based materials for frontline practitioner use.
Martin has written and published extensively around policy and procedural issues in the child protection field as well as the development of accessible, evidence-based assessment tools for frontline workers. His drive is to move beyond policy and procedural requirements to develop practice guidance that can empower rather than deskill busy frontline practitioners from the constituent agencies of the child protection system.
Sarah Campbell
Sarah is a research and policy officer at Bail for Immigration Detainees (BID), and is working on a three year partnership project with The Children’s Society to end the immigration detention of children (click here for more information). Before working at BID, Sarah was a policy officer for the Fawcett Society, a campaign for women’s rights, and a social policy researcher at King’s College London.
Brian Cantwell
Brian Cantwell trained in social work, latterly working as a practitioner and manager with the Family Court Welfare Service. Freelance since 1995, he has practised in the field of separation and divorce within CAMHS, Family Mediations - a Children’s Support Service, and as the leader of a multi-disciplinary group of experts, preparing Court assessments in high conflict private law cases.
Brian has worked closely with CAFCASS since the agency’s inception, as a consultant on the practice development and in training. Over the past two years he has published regularly in journals such as Family Law and Representing Children.
Jeanne CarlinJeanne Carlin is a freelance disability consultant. Having qualified as a social worker in 1990, Jeanne worked in children’s services as a social worker in the Humberside area for five years. She then took up the post of team manager in Barnardo’s, managing the disabled children’s team in Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire. This team provided both the social work service as well as family-based short breaks and sibling support.
In 2001 she left full-time employment to work on a freelance basis. Her main areas of work are research, writing publications and books, doing training and service evaluation. At present she is employed as a freelance consultant by the Council for Disabled Children to work on the Aiming High for Disabled Children programme. She is also a parent of a 25-year-old young woman with multiple impairments who provides much of the inspiration for her work.
Diana CassellDr Diana Cassell has been a consultant child psychiatrist in Kingston-upon-Thames since 1992. She has had an interest in studying and working with families where the parents have mental health problems and other complex difficulties since early in her training, and has published and run training events on the topic. She has held a role as the named doctor for child protection for the South West London and St George's Mental Health Trust where she works, and now has a management role as an associate medical director and does medico-legal work for Children Act proceedings, often where there are concerns about parental mental health difficulties.
Alex ChardAlex Chard MSc - Director YCTCS ltd, is a member of the Editorial Board of Community Care Inform. He has been advising CCI on the development of both the management and youth justice sections of the site.
Alex has worked for the last 20 years providing organisational development services within children’s services, youth justice and the voluntary sector. His knowledge and experience has been gained from working across a broad range of children’s services. He has previously managed youth justice services and fieldwork services for looked after children, children on the child protection register and children in need.
An area of interest is partnership development. He has been commissioned on a number of occasions to assist partners to review the role of children’s trusts and youth offending team boards. He has also assisted with reviewing the respective roles of a children’s trust and a safeguarding board. Another area of expertise is in the provision of management development programmes and providing advice on team and organisational dynamics. His work has also included assisting both children’s services and youth offending teams with development services linked to meeting inspection criteria.
In addition to his writing for Community Care Inform, a range of his work has been published. Working on behalf of the NYA and DCSF he wrote the national guidance for Positive Activities for Young People, Creating a Sense of Belonging. He co-authored a chapter Managerialism at the tipping point? published in Children’s Services at the Crossroads. He is a co-author of Defending Young People, a comprehensive guide to the law on young offenders.
Alex is also a visiting lecturer on the Professional Doctorate in Systemic Practice at the University of Bedfordshire and is currently completing a professional doctorate on systemic change and development in public sector management. His MSc in Systemic Leadership and Organisational Studies was on the impact of inspection on a management team. He is a member of the Institute of Directors and a member of the Society of Authors.
Anne ClarkeAnne Clarke is a qualified advisory teacher of the visually impaired. She has also had extensive experience as a specialist teacher of language and communication impaired pupils, and as a special educational needs co-ordinator. Anne is a Registered Intermediary for Vulnerable Witnesses with the Ministry of Justice, supporting disabled young people in their communication with the police and the courts.
Judy CorlyonJudy Corlyon is currently Principal Researcher at the Tavistock Institute, where she returned after three years spent working as a Principal Research Fellow at the Policy Research Bureau. In addition to her previous time at the Tavistock Institute, Judy has worked for many years in universities and children’s organisations as a researcher on family policy.
Her main areas of interest are teenage pregnancy, young parents, relationships between parents and children following divorce and separation, parenting support, and vulnerable children, especially those looked after away from home. In 1996 Judy co-founded the National Teenage Parent Research and Practice Group, a national network for anyone working with and on behalf of teenage parents. She is currently Chair of the Trustees of Docklands Outreach, a charity supporting disadvantaged young people in East London.
Andy CoxAndy is a qualified accountant and has worked for Leicester City Council for nine years. For seven of these he has worked in the Special Education Service as the SEN Finance Manager, and has acted in a temporary capacity as the Education Officer (SEN).
He has been heavily involved in reviewing and revising the funding mechanisms for Special Educational Needs in both mainstream and special schools in Leicester.
Dr Deborah ChristieDr Deborah Christie is a consultant clinical psychologist, honorary senior lecturer and head of paediatric and adolescent psychology at University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust since 1998. Her PhD was in neurobiology exploring the effects of early brain damage and recovery of function. She received a Fulbright scholarship and studied at the NorthEastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine teaching functional neuroanatomy and carrying out research on the anatomical substrates for conditioned learning. As a Medical Research Council post doctoral fellow Dr Christie spent three years at Oxford University before joining Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children completing research into long-term learning difficulties associated with treatment for cancer in children
She has published over 80 papers in the field of neuropsychology and her clinical work with young people with diabetes, obesity, cancer, Tourette’s syndrome and eating disorders. She currently works with young people who are searching for ways to live with chronic illness including diabetes, obesity, arthritis, chronic fatigue and chronic pain syndromes. Current research interests include neuropsychological outcomes in children and adolescent survivors of meningitis, quality of life measures in chronic illness and the development of effective multidisciplinary interventions for diabetes and obesity in children and adolescents.
Dr Christie developed the Healthy Eating Lifestyle Programme (HELP) as part of the University College Hospital Weight Management Clinic. HELP has also been incorporated into Watch-It a community based programme in Leeds. In 2001 she was awarded the Association for the Study of Obesity Best Practice award and the Society for Adolescent Medicine Diabetes award in Adolescent Health. She received the award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement in Clinical Health Psychology in 2004.
Alex ClapsonAlex Clapson is a registered social worker. He holds a diploma in social work and an MSc. (Econ.) in applied social studies. He has over 20 years experience of working with children and families in a variety of settings including residential, fostering and adoption, childcare, leaving care, disability, and family placements, both for local authorities and the voluntary sector. His experience includes nine years of working as a social worker and senior practitioner, prior to managing within the voluntary sector.
Alex has worked in partnership with other agencies developing needs-led services for children and families, and also for adults with life-limiting illnesses. He has also worked in Africa as an organisational development advisor, Alaska as a project manager for a youth development charity and India as a community development worker.
Alex worked as a family court advisor with Cafcass Cymru between 2002 and 2009, practicing predominantly in private law, and also assisted with the development of practice and training. He was the lead trainer for Dispute Resolution and co-facilitated training for Magistrates. During 2006, Alex was seconded as the practice development manager charged with the responsibility to prepare the Cafcass Cymru response to the Child Care Proceedings Review with colleagues within the Welsh Assembly Government. He also contributed towards the writing of a practitioner’s handbook, National Standards, Training and Effective Service Delivery.
For the last decade Alex has been a visiting lecturer on the BSc. in social work course at Swansea University, teaching individual helping skills, social work law, personal health and safety, and data protection/confidentiality modules. Prior to this, Alex was also involved with two research projects, namely Children and Decision Making and Children’s Health Needs.
Alex has also developed and delivered training for children’s contact centres and youth development charities. He continues to enjoy delivering independent training to organisations working with children and families.
Harriet Clarke
Harriet Clarke is a lecturer in social policy and social work at the Institute of Applied Social Studies, University of Birmingham. Previously, she worked with Richard Olsen on a Department of Health study of disabled parents and their families experiences (Olsen, R. and Clarke, H. (2003) Parenting and Disability: Disabled Parents’ Experiences of Raising Children, Bristol: The Policy Press). She has recently hosted an ESRC funded seminar series on Disabled Parents at the University of Birmingham, and has worked with the Commission for Social Care Inspection on a Special Study looking at policy and practice within local authorities in England.
Lisa CraigLisa Craig works for Triangle providing independent advocacy and support for disabled children and young people. Further roles include research and training. Lisa works as part of a team to facilitate the youngest consultation group, All Join In, an inclusive group of young children that meets monthly to provide consultation and advice to Triangle, and through Triangle to other organisations. Lisa has a health psychology background, and experience working with learning disabled children and young people in different settings.
Dr Heaven CrawleyDr Heaven Crawley is a Director of the Centre for Migration Policy Research at Swansea University and a Senior Research Associate at Oxford University’s Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS).
Heaven has undertaken research on asylum policy and practice in the UK and Europe for nearly 20 years, initially as part of a PhD at the University of Oxford, subsequently as head of asylum and immigration research at the UK Home Office and as Associate Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
Heaven has written and published extensively on a wide range of asylum and immigration issues including the impact of asylum policies, the interpretation of gendered experiences in the determination process, the causes of forced migration to Europe, public attitudes towards asylum and immigration issues and the experiences of asylum seeking children who are age disputed.
Heaven is regularly invited to advise governmental, statutory and voluntary organisations on aspects of immigration policy and practice and has twice served as a specialist adviser to Parliamentary committees (Home Office Select Committee and Joint Committee on Human Rights).
Mary DavidsonMary Davidson is a freelance journalist who has also worked for Surrey County Council's children's services for more than 20 years as a social work practitioner, team manager and since 2002 as a senior development manager for adoption and permanency. She is also panel advisor to the county's two adoption panels. Her academic interests include obtaining a Master's Degree from King's College, London University on the likely affects on adoption of the proposals contained in the 2000 Prime Minister's Review of Adoption and as a consultant on a recent study carried out by the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley into enhancing adoptive parenting for a country wide group of adopters experiencing early difficulties in parenting "late" adopted children. She has three grown up children and an ever-increasing band of grandchildren.
Trish DavidsonTrish has worked for CENMAC for seventeen years, initially as an advisory teacher, working with pupils in mainstream and special schools, and then in 2001 she became the Team Leader.
Since working at CENMAC Trish has built up her knowledge of working with pupils with a speech, language and communication difficulty particularly when the pupil is included in the mainstream setting. This has made all the staff working at CENMAC very aware of the needs of both the pupils and staff in secondary schools particularly in London where there is a fast turn over of staff in both Education and Health. In these situations CENMAC provides a constant element in the school support provided.
Staff working in this field are constantly learning. New technology arrives and must be taken on board in order to support pupils. This not only means being able to train the adults and pupil but help them implement new strategies to ensure that the pupil has the correct input and benefits from support.
Liz Davies
Liz Davies is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at London Metropolitan University teaching "Safeguarding Children" and "Communication with Children" modules at both undergraduate and post-graduate levels. She also delivers post-qualifying training, in joint investigation and investigative interviewing skills, to social workers and police. In 2007, with the publisher Akamas she published two introductory online child protection training courses and a resource book entitled "Protecting Children". Liz provides consultancy to the media and writes widely on child protection issues, more recently campaigning against the abolition of the child protection register. Whilst a team manager in Islington she exposed extensive abuse within the care system and later as a child protection manager in Harrow developed her specialism in child interview skills and the investigation of organised abuse networks. In 2005 she was the expert witness for Lisa Arthurworrey, social worker to Victoria Climbie, in her successful appeal to the Care Standards Tribunal and continues to support her in her appeal against the GSCC decision to refuse her registration. She contributes to the work of British Association of Social Workers' Children and Families Committee.
Alison DavisAlison Davis has worked in the health service, as a qualified nurse for 25 years. She is a registered general nurse and registered midwife. She is also a qualified health visitor with excess of 12 years experience, working within South East London PCT’s and for a local Sure Start Project. She started working in sexual health about 11 years ago. This began with clinical work and she is registered to prescribe certain medication and issue contraception and treat sexually transmitted infections. In 2003, she expanded on this role and undertook a PSHE certification, which qualified her to teach sex and relationship education.
She works as part of a team, who deliver SRE to all local schools and colleges within Lewisham PCT, as well as youth clubs, leaving care teams, pupil referral units and pupils with English as a second language. She has also contributed to the service's web site, providing information and advice about local sexual health services, www.kisp.org.uk
Michael Dawswell
Michael Dawswell is one of the founders of Mentivation Services, a team of professionals who specialise in working with young people from all ages, backgrounds and cultures, who are at risk of failing in education, engagement in the criminal justice system or generally just “hard to reach”. Mentivation Services helps and supports them in finding ways to understand, manage and cope better with the issues they encounter, working in partnership with other service providers such as schools, social services and youth services, as well as parents and carers.
The team also provides school and community-based mentoring, and a variety of workshop programmes with an emphasis on educational, social and cultural development. In addition to this, they provide staff training to organisations that want a better understanding of youth culture and want to engage better with young people.
For more information contact: Info@mentivationservices.co.uk or visit www.mentivationservices.co.uk.
Thangam DebbonaireThangam Debbonaire has 25 years of experience of research, practice and activism on domestic violence and gender equality in UK and Europe. This includes prevention work with young people in schools and youth work and with adult men who are using violence.
Since 2008 she has been Research Manager for Respect, the UK national organisation for work with domestic violence perpetrators, with overall responsibility for managing for the multi site research into the outcomes of participation in domestic violence perpetrator programmes. She is co-author of the Respect toolkit on work with male victims of domestic violence and currently manages Respect’s training programme.
Whilst National Children’s Officer at Women’s Aid in the 1990s she worked with government to bring about several significant changes including the law on injunctions to protect women and children. In 2005 she worked with National Youth Theatre, yeastproductions and Kevin Walton to produce “Spiralling”, an original film about domestic violence in a teenage relationship and an interactive DVD of resources and activities for use with children and young people of all ages, now widely used in schools across the UK and beyond.
In 2003 she assisted the Justice Department of the government of Ireland by evaluating the national provision of domestic violence perpetrator programmes on their behalf. A decade on and she is now involved in an EU project to develop evidence based self evaluation of perpetrator programmes across the EU, working with partners in Denmark, Austria, Germany and Spain.
She is also a prospective parliamentary candidate for Bristol West in the next general elections.
Delight Training
Delight Training Services have been providing training and consultancy for fifteen years. We work in the criminal justice arena in both secure and community settings, with social services, with the health service particularly around forensic mental health, and with a variety of other voluntary and statutory sector organisations where our services are of value. These services fall into two core categories; first of all, structured cognitive intervention programmes, particularly those focused on offending behaviour and in particular, substance abuse, and alcohol-related violence; and secondly, core practitioner skills which focus on enhancing more effective practice within a variety of existing methods of work.
Savita DeSousaSavita has worked for the British Association for Adoption and Fostering for four years. She has a national remit and responsibility for policy and development issues relating to private fostering and black minority ethnic children, who are unable to live with their birth families. Previously she has worked for local authorities and the voluntary sector. She has worked as a social worker, staff development officer and manager. She has experience of working in social services, corporate services and multi-disciplinary teams.
Elaine DibbenElaine Dibben started her social work career in residential social work and qualified in 1988. She has over 20 years’ experience of working in adoption and fostering in local authority and voluntary agency settings. She managed the Independent Review Mechanism from 2004 to 2009 and she is currently an adoption and fostering development consultant for BAAF.
She published her first book in 2010, Undertaking an Adoption Assessment: A guide to collecting and analysing information for the Prospective Adopter’s Report (formerly Form F) England.
Kamena DorlingKamena Dorling is policy & programmes manager at Coram Children’s Legal Centre, and runs the Centre’s Migrant Children’s Project, which assists non-legal specialists and front-line professionals in ensuring that the children with whom they are dealing obtain the services and assistance to which they are legally entitled. The project also campaigns to ensure that laws and policies protect the rights of migrant children, and to extend the protections available to them.
Kamena wrote the guide ‘Seeking Support: a guide to the rights and entitlements of separated children’, the forth edition of which came out in 2012, and co-authored the following reports: ‘Administrative detention of children: a global report’ (UNICEF & Coram Children’s Legal Centre, 2012); and ‘Navigating the System: Advice provision for young refugees and migrants’ (Coram Children’s Legal Centre, 2012). She co-chairs the Refugee Children’s Consortium, a group of over 30 organisations working to promote and protect the rights of refugee children (www.refugeechildrensconsortium.org.uk).
Kamena worked closely with refugees for several years at the Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture, and as assistant director of Women for Refugee Women. She has an LLM in International Human Rights Law.
Hazel DouglasHazel Douglas started her professional career as a clinical psychologist working with adults. She was always interested in early intervention and this led her to train as a child psychotherapist to work with children. She has now gone full circle with the Solihull Approach team and is developing antenatal and postnatal resources for adults as parents!
Susan DunstallSusan was a former policy advisor with the NSPCC and has recently moved into independent child protection consultancy. With a background in health, local government and the voluntary sector, she is well placed to provide training and other services to a wide range of agencies and professionals.
Susan regularly acts as an independent chair for serious case review (SCR) panels, and has been a member of the Department for Children, Schools and Families research steering groups into the biennial reviews of SCRs, and the evaluation of LSCBs.
She completed Warwick University’s advanced course in the Management of Unexpected Child Deaths in 2008, and is currently independent chair of a LSCB. In her spare time Susan is an associate lecturer with the Open University.
Andrew Durham
Andrew Durham has been a qualified social worker since 1983; he has the Advanced Award in Social Work (AASW), and a Ph.D in Applied Social Studies, from the University of Warwick, which researched into the impact of child sexual abuse.
He has over twenty years experience of providing therapeutic services to children and young people. He has specialised in the field of post-abuse counselling and interventions for children and young people with sexual behaviour difficulties for the past 15 years.
Andrew Durham is currently the consultant practitioner for the Sexualised Inappropriate Behaviours Service (SIBS), a countrywide Children Young and Families Services resource, within Warwickshire County Council. He has managed this service for the past 12 years, this work has involved: providing specialist therapuetic work for children and young people; training and consultation for social workers, psychologists and related professionals; field research, policy development and writing practice protocols. He also works in this field as an independent child care consultant, again undertaking therapeutic work with children and young people, consultancy, lecturing and training.
Andrew Durham is a visiting lecturer at the University of Warwick, and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Qualitiative Social Work. He is author of the books Young Men Surviving Child Sexual Abuse - Research Stories and Lessons for Therapeutic Practice (2003) and Young Men Who have Sexually Abused - A Case Study Guide (2006), both published by John Wiley and Sons Ltd. He has also published academic papers and other chapters. He has been "checked" and approved by The Law Society as an expert witness, and has been an advisor to the BBC.
Ratna Dutt
Ratna is a qualified social worker and chief executive of the Race Equality Foundation, a registered charity that explores what is known about discrimination and disadvantage, and uses the evidence to overcome barriers and promote race equality in social care, health and housing.
Ratna’s areas of experience and expertise includes: race equality in child care and child protection, race equality in mental health, and workforce issues relating to black and minority ethnic staff. Ratna has written extensively on social care issues, including a chapter in ‘Assessing the needs of black and minority ethnic children and families’, The Child’s World 2010 (Dutt, R and Phillips, M).
Ratna is chair of an adoption panel in a London local authority and vice chair of another. She is also a member of the recently set up ‘NHS Future Forum’. She received an OBE in 2000 for her work in race equality.
Judith EdwardsJudith Edwards (PhD) is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist teaching and supervising on various courses at the Tavistock Clinic, where she is also course tutor for the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies for non-clinical students. Apart from publishing papers in academic journals internationally, she has contributed to many books including most recently The Emotional Experience of Adoption (Hindle and Shulman, Routledge, 2008) and (Acquainted with the Night: Psychoanalysis and the Poetic Imagination (Canham and Satyamurti, Karnac, 2003). She also conceived and edited Being Alive (Routledge, 2001) on the work of Anne Alvarez. She was joint editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy from 1996 to 2000, and has edited numerous books on psychoanalytic subjects, including Live Company ( Alvarez 1992, Routledge), Arctic Spring: Potential for Growth in Adults with Psychosis and Autism (Tremelloni 2005, Karnac) ,Psychotherapy with Young People in Care: Lost and Found (Hunter 2001, Brunner-Routledge) , and Intellectual Disability, Trauma and Psychotherapy (Edited Cottis, 2009, Routledge). Click here for a link to five books about child psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Helen Elliott
Helen Elliott qualified as a Social Worker in 1982 and has extensive experience both as a practitioner and a manager in local authority children and families services and The Probation Service where she managed Probation teams working with sexual and violent offenders.
Helen has a particular interest in multi-agency work and prior to her current post was responsible for implementing and co-ordinating Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) in the London Probation Area, working closely with Police and other partner agencies. This included input to a Home Office Multi-Agency Group that produced the National MAPPA Manual of Guidance. She also contributed to the work of the Project Team in developing a national database of sexual and violent offenders (ViSOR).
Helen is now working for the London Borough of Barnet where she is Development Manager for the Safeguarding Children Board , a multi-agency strategic group that is responsible for ensuring that agencies work together effectively to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and young people.
Catherine EllisRegistered General Nurse (1986), Registered Midwife (1989) and Registered Health Visitor (1992). Currently employed in a research and teaching role in child health at the University of Warwick, and Consultant Nurse specialising in the child death process, rapid response and investigation of child death for West Midlands Strategic Health Authority and Warwickshire Community Health Service. Formerly the Lead Nurse for Child Protection at University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire, I have worked extensively in the field of child protection for 18 years.
Andy ElvinAndy graduated from University with a degree in Media and Cultural Studies. He later travelled to the USA and worked as a childcare worker and foster parent in Portland, Maine for two years at a school for children with profound emotional and behavioural issues. He then returned to the UK and took a Masters Degree in Social Work before employment in various posts involving, adults with mental health issues, autistic children, and as a residential social worker at a family assessment centre. This was followed by three years as a Children and Families Social Worker at two London Boroughs.
In 2001 Andy became the Director of the Soho Family Centre, an NGO that offers a full range of childcare, early education, family support and community projects to the diverse community of Soho. He had full responsibility for staff management, fundraising, legal and financial matters; the work involved liaison and representation with professional and corporate organisations.
For three years prior to joining his current post, Andy was the project manager for Children’s Centres and Extended Schools at the London Borough of Richmond, with responsibility for establishing 12 children’s centres bringing together a range of preventative child and family services. Some of the centres were ‘new build’ and his role included managing a £20 million capital and revenue budget.Andy joined CFAB as Chief Executive in July 2009.
Pauline EmmettDr Pauline Emmett is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Child and Adolescent Health in Bristol University. She is a highly experienced research Nutritionist and Dietician and was head of Nutrition Research for the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (Children of the 90s) for 15 years. Since 1993 she has been working in the area of nutrition and diet in pregnancy and childhood and is particularly interested in early growth and development. Her PhD from Bristol University involved research into childhood diet. She has published many scientific papers using data from Children of the 90s. She has personal experience of bringing up two children so has tested out some of the theory and can provide practical as well as scientific knowledge.
Mike EvansMike Evans qualified as a social worker in 1972. He has worked in both statutory social services and the voluntary sector. From 1979 he was unit organiser for Bradford Family Service Unit, there he managed a range of services for families and local communities. In 1987 Mike joined the National Institute for Social Work (NISW) as a consultant in organisational and management issues in child and family care. His work also had an international dimension and involved advising on UK government international programmes.
In 2001, following the government’s modernisation agenda, he became a consultant with the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) and worked at developing best practice guides and ‘communities of practice’ groups. In 2002, he established his own consultancy. This work utilises a range of approaches to management and organisational concerns, with particular emphasis on the role of the multi disciplinary frontline manager and the development of the competent workplace.
Julia FeastJulia Feast is the policy, research and development consultant, British Association for Adoption and Fostering. In the past she managed the post-adoption and care counselling research project, The Children’s Society, worked as a local authority social worker and team manager, and also as a children’s guardian and reporting officer. She has published many articles on the subject of adoption search and reunion. She has also written about the rights to information for former care adults and children conceived as a result of donor-assisted conception. In 2000, in collaboration with Professor David Howe and her colleagues at the Children Society, she published a large-scale study entitled Adoption Search and Reunion - the Long-Term Experience of Adopted Adults, which was republished by BAAF in 2003. In collaboration with Dr John Triseliotis and Dr Fiona Kyle, she reported the findings from a further study entitled Adoption Triangle Revisited, (BAAF 2005), exploring adoptive and birth parents’ experience of adoption search and reunion.
Fiona Ferguson
Fiona is a qualified social worker with a range of experience of working in child protection in England and Scotland. She qualified as a social worker in Canada but has worked in various local authorities in England and Scotland since qualifying in a variety of jobs including: social worker, senior practitioner, social work inspector, performance management officer, and latterly as an independent reviewing officer and chair, reviewing child protection and looked after children. Fiona is registered with the Scottish Social Services Council. She recently spent two months volunteering in Malawi to develop social work programmes there, before returning to the UK and taking up the role of team leader on a duty Children and Families team in Central Scotland.
Donald ForresterDonald Forrester was a child care social worker and senior practitioner in an inner London authority from 1992 to 1999. Since 1999 Donald has been a lecturer and researcher. He has been involved in studies on care planning, on initial social work assessments, on social work with parental substance misuse and on training child and family social workers motivational interviewing.
He is author of a number of recent articles in the area of parental substance misuse and is co-author of a forthcoming book Parents Who Misuse Drugs or Alcohol: Effective Interventions in Social Work and Child Protection. Donald is particularly interested in the relationship between research and practice. He is currently working with the Welsh Assembly Government on building better links between evidence and practice. He is also the co-ordinator for the United Kingdom Social Work Research Strategy.
Anita Franklin
Dr Anita Franklin has over 15 years experience of undertaking research with vulnerable groups of children and young people. Currently she is a Senior Researcher at The Children’s Society where she manages a number of research projects concerning disabled children and young people. Previously Anita was a Research Fellow at the Social Policy Research Unit, University of York where she authored a number of publications concerning the participation of disabled children and young people in decision-making.
Claire Friday
Claire works as Support Manager at Adoption UK, a national charity supporting both prospective adopters as well as adopters. Claires role is managing the front line support offered including their national helpline, buddy support and more intensive one-to-one support through Adoption UK's Parent Consultation Service. Claire is an adoptive parent as well as having a birth child and through her work, as well as personal expeience, she has gained insight into the difficulties experienced by families at varying stages of their adoption journey. It's essential for parents to have realistic and timely support not only at the outset of their adoption journey but throughout in order to fully support them in their role of therapeutic parenting.
Nick FrostNick Frost is Professor of Social Work (Children, childhood and families), at the Faculty of Health, Leeds Metropolitan University. Nick has published in the fields of child welfare and professional learning: most recently he has written, ‘Understanding Children’s Social Care’ (with Nigel Parton, Sage, 2009), Re-thinking Children and Families’ (Continuum, 2011) and co-edited ‘Beyond Reflective Practice’ (Routledge, 2010). Nick is a registered social worker, and practiced in local authority social work settings for 15 years before commencing his academic career.
Judith FurnivallJudy Furnivall is a lecturer at the Centre for Excellence for Looked After Children in Scotland based in the University of Strathclyde with lead responsibility for consultancy.
She worked as a member of staff and assistant director at Peper Harow Therapeutic Community for seven years. Since moving to Scotland she has worked as a lecturer, researcher, trainer and consultant with a particular focus on residential child care.
She is a founder member of Scottish Attachment in Action, a network of professionals across Scotland committed to improving the understanding of attachment and its importance in providing the best care for all children. As well as her belief in the importance of attachment she also maintains a focus on the need to adopt an approach to vulnerable children that is informed by a trauma perspective but which recognises the importance of developing resilience. Her other interests include the education and health of looked after children, therapeutic care, the interface between fostering and residential care and the dynamics of organisations.
Eileen FurslandEileen Fursland is a freelance writer. She writes mainly about social issues, particularly those affecting children, and has contributed many articles to a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including The Guardian. She has also authored or co-authored a number of books, guides, training programmes and booklets for BAAF Adoption and Fostering. She has written three books: Children's Play; Working Mum's Handbook (with Carole Smillie); and Get Your Kids Fit! (with Kelly Holmes), all published by Virgin Publishing; and an online reference source for anyone who works with children and young people, called Understanding the Child (to be published by Pearson Publishing Group in late 2010). Her most recent books are Facing up to Facebook: A Survival guide for adoptive families and Social Networking and Contact: How social workers can help adoptive families (available at www.baaf.org.uk). Eileen has also written a guide for adopted teenagers and a book on managing social networking in foster care, both of which will be published by BAAF in late 2010. Eileen is also delivering training courses and writing a training course for BAAF on the issue of social networking and adoption.
Fiona GardnerFiona Gardner trained as a social worker and as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has worked in a generic social services team, in child and family guidance, the NHS in a clinic for young people, and in the voluntary sector as well as running a private practice. She is currently employed as child protection adviser for the Church of England in the Diocese of Bath and Wells, and as supervisor for the Professional Masters Programme in Counselling and Psychotherapy at
She has published in leading national and international journals on gender, child sexual abuse and psychotherapy training, and has contributed to several edited books. She is the author of Self-Harm, a psychotherapeutic approach (Brunner-Routledge 2001), Journeying Home (Darton, Longman and Todd) 2004, The Four Circles of Love (Darton, Longman and Todd 2007), and is working on a co-edited book Researching, Reflecting and Writing about Work (Routledge)
Gillian GaskellGillian Gaskell qualified with a BSc (Hons) in Speech Pathology and Therapy from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2005 and is currently employed as a Specialist Speech and Language Therapist by South Birmingham Primary Care Trust (PCT). Based in two different localities, she works in clinics, schools and nurseries to support children and young people with a range of speech, language and communication needs. Prior to this she held a Specialist Speech and Language Therapist post at Central Lancashire PCT. She has a particular interest in dysfluency (stammering) and is an active member of both the National and West Midlands Dysfluency Special Interest Groups (SIG).
Mike GatehouseMike Gatehouse is a freelance consultant who specialises in the use of information in children's social care. He co-ordinated the Data Analysis Network of six Welsh local authorities and worked with the Wales System Consortium on specifications for a new IT system to implement the ICS. He has worked on a number of projects with the Centre for Child and Family Research at Loughborough University, including the availability of foster care, extensions to the Children in Need Census and information outputs from children's services.
He conducted an information outputs audit for Hull City Council’s children and young people's service and has recently undertaken similar work at Leeds City Council. Mike lives in Brecon, South Wales and is married with three grown-up children.
Loraine GelsthorpeDr Loraine Gelsthorpe is Reader in Criminology and Criminal Justice at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Early on in her career Loraine had experience of working in psychiatric hospitals and then in residential care – with troubled children and young people. Study at Sussex University and then Cambridge led to an academic career, but one which has taken her in and out of police stations, courts, and prisons. Current research and teaching revolves around youth justice, restorative justice, race and gender issues in criminal justice, community penalties, and resettlement issues for women.
Recent publications include: Provision for Women Offenders in the Community (with Gilly Sharpe and Jenny Roberts, and published by the Fawcett Society) and the Handbook of Probation (edited with Rod Morgan, and published by Willan Publishing). She has recently completed research on ‘music in prisons’ also (for the Irene Taylor Music Trust). Loraine is a UKCP registered psychoanalytical psychotherapist in her spare time.
Perdeep Gill
Perdeep Gill is presently an independent social care trainer and consultant, providing training to statutory and voluntary sectors. She also provides specialist advice on safeguarding cases involving minority ethnic communities.
She graduated with a social work qualification in 1990 and has held both practitioner and managerial posts as well having been a child protection advisor. She specialised in child sex abuse while at Great Ormond Street Hospital. She has written on child sex abuse and given evidence to the United Nations on modern slavery. She has undertaken research and consultation work with faith and diverse communities with regard to safeguarding. She has also written child protection manuals in relation to issues of forced marriages and race and equality.
Perdeep is a child protection advisor to a number of regional and national BME voluntary and faith groups.
Danya Glaser
Danya Glaser is Consulate Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, London. Previously a developmental paediatrician, she has also worked in Child Psychiatry in the community. Previosuly, she headed an integrated child protection service working respectively with the identification and treatment of emotional abuse; providing multidisciplinary assessments for Children Act proceedings and a post protection team working with children who have been seriously maltreated and their current, often new carers. Dr Glaser has taught and written widely on various aspects of child maltreatment, including sexual and emotional abuse, fabricated or induced illness; and the effects of child maltreatment on the developing brain. With her research team she is currently completing a follow up study of children who have been subject to care proceedings and has recently co-authored a book on the evidence base on attachment and attachment disorders. Dr Glaser is immediate past president of the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN), immediate past member of the Family Justice Council and Visiting Professor at UCL and the Anna Freud Centre. She is chair of Coram adoption panel.
Sally Goddard BlytheSally Goddard Blythe MSc.FRSA, is a Consultant in Neuro-developmental Education and Director of The Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology (INPP) in Chester. INPP was established as a private research, clinical and training organisation in 1975, dedicated to the development of assessment procedures to identify underlying physical factors in specific learning difficulties and adults suffering from anxiety and panic disorder and to the development of effective remediation programmes.
Sally is the author of several books and published papers on child development and neuro-developmental factors in specific learning difficulties including: Reflexes, Learning and Behavior, The Well Balanced Child and What Babies and Children REALLY Need. Her newest book, Attention, Balance and Coordination – the A,B,C of Learning Success, a reference source for all professionals involved in child development and education.
Sally is the author of The INPP Test Battery and Developmental Exercise Programme for use in Schools – a programme of daily exercises designed to be used in schools with a whole class of children over one academic year – this programme has been the subject of published research involving 810 children across schools in the UK. The aim of the programme has been to provide teachers with a method to help them identify physical readiness for learning and a programme of exercises designed to encourage physical readiness in children with problems.
Sally has lectured on the role of infant reflexes in development and later learning problems to many different groups throughout Europe and in different parts of the United States. She is a member of the International Alliance for Childhood and the “Open EYE” campaign – a pressure group dedicated to ensuring that children’s developmental needs remain at the top of the agenda for government recommendations for early years’ education in England. She is also a patron of Toddler Kindy Gymbaroo, a programme developed in Australia to optimise children’s development in the early years.
Lisa Gordon ClarkLisa Gordon Clark is a qualified play therapist and co-ordinator of communications and public relations for the British Association of Play Therapists (www.bapt.info). Following a degree in psychology she initially trained as a primary school teacher and taught for six years, latterly in special educational needs, before suspending her career for motherhood.
Two wonderful daughters later, Lisa trained further in dramatherapy and then play therapy at Roehampton,
Much of her practice is on a freelance basis in the West London area (as PlayFully), but since 2005 she has also been based part time at a child and family centre in the London Borough of Hounslow. She is a BAPT- registered clinical supervisor and has also done some training in filial therapy.
She was on the board of directors of BAPT from 1998-2006 and recently co-led an introductory play therapy training course in Mumbai, India.
Louise GrantLouise Grant is a senior lecturer in social work and a registered social worker. She has many years of experience as a social worker and a manager in children’s services. For the last five years she has taught qualifying and post-qualifying social workers at the University of Bedfordshire and is course lead for all post-qualifying social work courses at the university. This experience enables her to have an understanding of the complexities of social work practice and its emotional demand, and the tools required to ensure well-being and emotional resilience in practice. Her research focuses on emotional resilience reflection and stress management in social workers.
Louise has published several articles in high impact peer reviewed journals (such as the British Journal of Social Work) and in the general social work press, and presented her work at national and international conferences.
Malcolm Green
Malcolm has worked for 18 as the Senior Education Welfare officer for Blaenau Gwent. Over the past 24 years Malcolm has also served Gwent as a magistrate. He spent 20 years on the family panel, being the chairman for 9 years and as deputy chairman before this. Malcolm has served on several court committees including the Gwent Advisory panel for the selection of new magistrates.
Dr Karen GuldbergKaren Guldberg (BA; PGCE; PGCert; MA; M.Ed; PhD) is a Lecturer in Autism Studies, School of Education, University of Birmingham. Karen taught children with autism for many years and now delivers training programmes for practitioners. Her research focuses on educational intervention for children with autism and the training needs of practitioners. She is particularly interested in how technology enhanced learning environments can enable learning.
Anna GuptaAnna is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and the Head of Department in the Department of Health and Social Care at Royal Holloway, University of London. Anna's professional background is in social work with children and families. She worked as a child protection social worker and team manager in two London Boroughs and has also extensive experience working as a Children's Guardian and independent social worker in the family courts. For the past 9 years she has run the successful post-qualifying programmes for child care social workers at Royal Holloway and has recently been appointed as Head of Department. Her current research interests are inter-professional work, decision-making in the family courts and with children looked after, and the development of critically reflective social work practice with children and families.
Trish Hafford-LetchfieldTrish is a teaching fellow for interprofessional learning at Middlesex University and is involved in leadership and management education, and post qualifying social work with adults. Trish has more than ten years management experience in a statutory setting and is an active management mentor and coach. Trish has published widely on management and organisational development, older people and sexuality issues in social work. Her most recent books ‘Social care management: strategy and business planning’ was published in 2010 with Jessica Kingsley and ‘Sexuality in social work: research and reflections from women in the field’ was published in 2011 with Ashgate Press.
Gill Hague
Professor Gill Hague is the Co-Director of the Violence Against Women Research Group at the University of Bristol. This group has a strong reputation for gender violence research and is very well-known in the field nationally and internationally, working in an activist frame whenever possible.
Gill has been working on domestic violence for 35 years as an activist, social worker, manager, researcher and scholar. She has conducted a large number of research projects on the issue in many countries including India, South Africa, Canada, Kurdistan and Uganda.
Her research crosses the domestic violence field. For example, she recently led a large collaborative study on how to involve domestic violence survivors in service development, and directed the first-ever national UK study of disabled women and domestic violence. She has produced over 90 publications on violence against women including the popular overview book with Ellen Malos, Domestic Violence: Action for Change.
Sue Hanson
Sue is a specialist health visitor working with the Growth and Nutrition Service at NHS Leeds Community Healthcare. She is a member of a multi disciplinary team working with families where children have faltering weight or are failing to thrive. The team includes paediatricians, a community paediatric dietician, a clinical psychologist and a play specialist, and works closely with health and social care practitioners, and local nurseries and schools.
Sue has worked extensively as a health visitor and taught for several years in further education. Prior to her current post, Sue has held specialist posts in safeguarding and childhood obesity. Most recently she has been involved in the EMPOWER childhood obesity research project and the HENRY (Health Exercise and Nutrition for the Really Young) training programme for frontline practitioners as a national trainer.
Elizabeth HarlowElizabeth Harlow qualified as a social worker in 1981 and was awarded a PhD in social sciences in 1998. She is currently employed by the University of Salford as a senior research fellow. Her overarching research interest is in human relations and this has been purused in relation to: gender and sexuality; child welfare; the organisation and management of social work; and the changing construction of the social work profession. With particular expertise in qualitative and case study methodologies, she has evaluated the provision of community and safeguarding services to children and their families, as well as conducted exploratory research on the incidence of teenage pregnancy. Theoretical and empirically based papers have been published in the leading social work journals. In addition to having edited the journal Social Work and Social Sciences Review she has co-edited two books. She is currently editing a collection of papers on the future of foster care in the United Kingdom which is due to be published by Whiting and Birch in 2008. This academic activity is informed by previous experience as a social work practitioner, manager and educator.
Lynne HarneDr Lynne Harne has been working around violence against women and children for the last 25 years. She has undertaken research on the impact of domestic violence from violent fathers, including looking at these fathers’ perspectives and parenting practices.
She is currently concerned with risk assessment in this context at the University of Bristol. She also undertakes education and training on domestic violence and family policy, and her recent publications include (with J Radford) Tackling Domestic Violence: Theories, Policy and Practice (Open University Press, 2008), which is aimed at professionals.
Gordon Harold
Professor Gordon Harold is the Alexander McMillan Chair in Childhood Studies, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Centre for Research on Children and Families at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His primary research interests focus on the effects of family stress on children's emotional, behavioural and academic development. He has conducted several large-scale, longitudinal studies looking at the effects of inter-parental conflict on children. He is presently involved in several projects aimed at highlighting the underlying psychological mechanisms that explain differences in children's adaptation to hostile inter-parental relations and how evidence-based intervention programmes may be developed to improve outcomes for children most at risk from “seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another”.
Dr Di Hart
Di Hart worked for many years as a childcare social worker and manager before taking up a practice development post at the National Children’s Bureau. She has a particular interest in children in secure settings. Recent work has included the development of a care-planning model for looked after children who go into custody and a review of the use of physical restraint in secure children’s homes. Di also continues to be committed to supporting practitioners within children’s social care services working in safeguarding or looked after services. She has undertaken a project aiming to improve outcomes for the children of drug-misusing parents and is co-author of Adult Problems, Children’s Needs: Assessing the Impact of Parental Drug Use – a Toolkit for Practitioners and Putting Corporate Parenting into Practice.
Gill Haworth Gill Haworth is director of Intercountry Adoption Centre (IAC). She has specialised in the field of intercountry adoption since 1992 when she became director of Overseas Adoption Helpline, IAC’s predecessor. Gill is a qualified social worker and has worked continuously in child care, in either the statutory or voluntary sector, since 1971. She was an adoption practitioner and then team manager of fostering and adoption services in a local authority setting for several years. She has experience as chair and vice chair of agency adoption panels. Gill is currently chair of the Adoption Agencies’ Consultants Group on Intercountry Adoption and is vice chair of the Network for Intercountry Adoption in the UK.
Angie Heal
Angie Heal originally trained as a general and psychiatric nurse, working for over 15 years in hospitals in the south of England and Yorkshire. She also has extensive experience in the drugs field as a practitioner and manager in residential and community settings, with drug using parents and offenders.
After completing a Masters in Research Methods she worked in the voluntary sector, and for the police for eight years as a researcher /analyst in the field of social policy and crime before working for a local safeguarding children board. She is currently a freelance author, working with Tri.x, writing policies and procedures for the social care sector.
Angie is a trustee with Sheffield Working Women's Opportunities Project (SWWOP), a small voluntary sector project in Sheffield working with women involved in street prostitution, and supervisor to the project manager. She is planning to complete her PhD in criminology at the University of Sheffield in 2012.
Jane HeldJane Held has 28 years of experience in social care. For 15 years she worked directly with looked-after children in a variety of settings, managing a range of children’s residential foster and adoption services. She subsequently held a number of senior management posts most recently as director of social services in the London Borough of Camden. She was also the co-chair of the Association of Directors of Social Services Children and Families Committee from 2001 to 2003. Jane is now running her own consultancy. A children’s services specialist, she is working on a range of projects relating to Every Child Matters for the Department for Children, Schools and Families as well as the Commission for Social Care Inspection, the Improvement and Development Agency and the Local Government Association. She is the lead consultant on the DCSF placement stability programme after undertaking research for them on placement stability in 2005.
Pauline HeslopDr Pauline Heslop has a background of working with children and young people in a variety of settings in the
She has an international reputation for her research work about the transition of young people with learning disabilities towards adulthood. The report called ‘Bridging the Divide at Transition’ contributed thinking towards the development of the learning disability White Paper Valuing People in 2001 and has been widely quoted in government documents. Her most recent project, ‘Help to Move On’, focuses on the experiences of young people with learning disabilities who are placed in out-of-area residential schools and colleges at transition.
Andrew Hill
Andrew Hill is a lecturer in social work at the University of York. Before taking up his current post he worked as a social worker for twenty years, starting as a member of a "generic" local authority social work team, but soon specializing in work with children and families. His interests and experience include family support, child protection, therapeutic work with children, gender and social work with children and families, and also adoption and fostering. Most recently Andrew worked in the voluntary sector, undertaking therapeutic work with children who had been maltreated, often sexually abused. A growing awareness of the impact of such abuse on all the members of the family led to an interest in trying to understand how professionals might be able to help. His PhD research was into the complex relationships between professional therapists and safe carers in helping their sexually abused children.
Tracy HindTracy Hind is a youth and community development consultant with 20 years' experience of working in the statutory and voluntary sector. Trained as a youth worker, she has developed and managed numerous young lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) young people's services. She was the LGB Youth Project Officer for London Youth, a large charity working to support young people, and the Youth Project Officer for GALOP, a national LGB charity working to support victims of homophobic violence. She is now a Trustee of Allsorts LGBT Youth Project in Brighton. Tracy now works freelance and is an Associate Consultant and Trainer for UK Youth, and is an Associate Consultant for WSA Community Consultants. She is also an Associate Tutor at Sussex University where she teaches on the Foundation Degree in Community Development. Tracy's main interests are in developing work that challenges exclusion and promotes equality, with a particular focus on gender, sexual orientation and race, and she is currently also an Equalities Trainer for Brighton and Hove City Council.
Pauline HogganPauline obtained a CQSW in 1973 from Edinburgh University and a Diploma in Advanced Social Work Studies with distinction form Dundee University in 1993.Most of Pauline’s career in social work has been focused on children and families work, although she started as a trainee and then a main grade social worker in generic urban area teams in Edinburgh. Pauline spent a number of years managing permanence planning and family finding, and then in the child care planning section, of Lothian Region. Pauline became Head of Service in Argyll and Bute Council at the time of local government reform.
After several years as Director of a small voluntary adoption agency in London, Pauline returned to Scotland to work on a freelance basis. Since then she has worked mainly for local authorities and voluntary agencies. This has included policy and procedures development, case reviews, evaluations, independent consultations and inter-agency Child Protection and Integrated Assessment Training. Pauline also worked as a tutor on the Open University Diploma in Social Work course.
Pauline is the Chair of the Inverclyde Council Adoption, Fostering and Permanence Panel, and of the Action for Children Scottish Fostering Panel.
Pauline is involved, as a volunteer, with a UK charity, the Children and Families International Foundation, whose focus is to develop and support Malawian family and kinship based care for orphaned children. As part of this, Pauline has carried out workshops and tutorials with students on the first Malawi qualifying social work course in 2007. She is an associate of the Scottish/Malawi Partnership.
Dr Anne Hollows
Dr Anne Hollows is a principal lecturer and research coordinator for social work in the Centre for Health and Social Care Research for Sheffield Hallam University. Prior to her appointment at Sheffield Hallam University, Anne taught at the University of East London. She previously headed the Child Abuse Training Unit at the National Children's Bureau for seven years, where she developed training materials for child protection practice under the Children Act 1989, under contract from the Department of Health. Her social work career, in both England and Scotland, included work as a probation officer and as a hospital social worker, as well as a period in research and planning. She has served on and chaired adoption panels, participated in reviews of practice, and has also worked closely with NCH, the Children's Charity, for many years.
Her research focuses on aspects of social work, and inter-professional practice with children and families. In particular she has developed work with an international team on judgement and decision-making, as it operates in the child protection arena. She also works extensively in policy and practice development and evaluation in the field of family support. Much of her current work centres on inter-professional practice, in each of the above areas. Two years ago she completed a Lottery funded project investigating the experiences of professional support of women in the South Asian community who were victims of domestic violence. For some years she has engaged with the work of faith communities in combating child abuse, sexual harassment and domestic violence.
Current research includes evaluation of Sure Start projects in South and West Yorkshire, including a detailed study of the mainstreaming of a trailblazer project. She is involved in a study mapping the qualifications and training in the children's services workforce for the DfES, and evaluation of a complex inter-professional programme of work with children. She currently supervises PhD students working on studies of recruitment and retention in the children's services workforce and on adoption of sibling groups. She continues to work with colleagues in Australia and the USA in a series of studies investigating the ecology of decision making in child protection and is currently developing an international study of the impact on decision making of supervision, in different professional groups.
Joy Howard
Joy Howard was the originator of Support Care, and initiated and developed the service in Bradford from 1996-2005. During this time she also worked closely with the Fostering Network to disseminate the ideas, help develop good practice and ensure links between developing schemes were maintained across the UK.
Viv HoworthViv Howorth worked as a residential worker in the North West before qualifying as a social worker in 1985. Since then she has worked as a child care social worker and family placement supervising social worker in South Yorkshire before managing part of the fostering service in Sheffield.
She has worked for BAAF as a trainer consultant in the Yorkshire and Humber Region since 2004 and currently chairs fostering, adoption and IRM (Independent Review Mechanism) panels as part of this role.
Anita Hurrell is legal and policy officer with the Migrant Children’s Project at Coram Children’s Legal Centre (CCLC). Before joining CCLC she worked as a caseworker at Refugee and Migrant Justice and as a senior researcher at the think tank Policy Network, where she managed the migration programme. For more information on the Migrant Children’s Project please see http://www.childrenslegalcentre.com/index.php?page=migrant_children
Sandra HutchinsonSandra Hutchinson is editor of The Good Schools Guide - Special Educational Needs, an established writer and editor of The Good Schools Guide and agony aunt and regular contributor to First 11 magazine. She has undertaken numerous roles in education, including: head of maths, assistant head, and AFF worldwide education specialist, where she advised individuals and policy makers on all aspects of education.
She has worked as a volunteer with children in care, adults with learning difficulties and hearing-impaired young people. Her interest in special educational needs developed, when as a newly-qualified teacher, a colleague advised her to 'knit' with disaffected teenagers rather than attempt to teach them. Alarmed, she enlisted on one of the first post Warnock Report courses aimed at teaching children with learning disabilities in mainstream schools and subsequently worked on one of the ground-breaking enhancing achievement projects.
Sonia JacksonSonia Jackson OBE AcSS FRSA is Professor of Social Care and Education at the University of London Institute of Education. She is a qualified clinical psychologist and social worker and was Head of Social Policy and Applied Social Studies at the University of Wales Swansea before moving to direct research projects at the Thomas Coram Research Unit. She has served as a Trustee, and now Patron of the Who Cares?Trust and as Chair of Children in Wales. She has published many books, chapters and research reports on all aspects of public care, but particularly on the interface between care and education.. She first drew attention to the neglected education of children in care in the early 1980s and carried out the only UK study of university students who have been in care, Her current project is a five nation study of educational pathways of young people with a public care background, funded by the European Union.
Glenys JonesDr. Glenys Jones (MA; MEd; PhD) is a Chartered Psychologist and a Lecturer and Researcher in the Autism Centre for Education and Research (ACER) at the University of Birmingham. She has been engaged in research into educational provision and interventions in the field of autism for over 25 years and is Editor of the Good Autism Practice Journal, published by BILD. She led the research to inform the work of the Autism Education Trust (Jones et al., 2008) and has recently been involved in creating the new web and DVD resource on the autism spectrum for all mainstream primary and secondary schools, produced by the DCSF.
Rita JordanRita has a BSc: Psychology, an MSc: Child Development, an MA: Linguistics and a PhD. In the 1960s she established services for children then excluded from education, She is a qualified teacher and was Deputy Principal of a school for children with ASD. From 1993, she developed a range of professional development programmes in autism studies at The University of Birmingham, including a web-based one. She established two journals in Autism (one of which she co-edited for 11 years) and served on the board of two others. She has written about and researched many aspects of ASD and has been involved in training events, consultations and conferences nationally and internationally. She has served on many task forces and working parties to review evidence and offer advice in relation to ASD. In 2007 she received an OBE for her services to special needs education.
Gill Joyce Gill’s professional background prior to joining the CPSU spanned more than 20 years in the health service. After qualifying at the Hospitals for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street she later moved into a career in health visiting, developing a specialist focus and expertise in child protection which included the development and delivery of Area Child Protection Committee multi-agency child protection training. She was awarded a masters with distinction in Child Welfare and Protection in 2005. Gill has a passion for sport as a participant, a volunteer and as a parent of children involved in sports at varying competitive levels. Gill Joyce is a Senior Consultant with the NSPCC and joined the Child Protection in Sport Unit (CPSU) in June 2004 as a National Development Officer. The NSPCC is the UK’s leading charity specialising in child protection and the prevention of cruelty to children. In 2001, the NSPCC in collaboration with Sport England established the CPSU, a unique and highly influential initiative to protect all children in sport from abuse. The CPSU was set up to translate into action ambitious plans to raise safeguarding awareness, standards, knowledge and skills throughout sport. The CPSU provides a comprehensive support service to stakeholders in sport on all matters relating to safeguarding and the protection of children.
Dr Gail KinmanDr Gail Kinman is Professor of Occupational Health Psychology at the University of Bedfordshire. She is a chartered psychologist, a chartered scientist and an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society. Gail's research interests encompass work-related stress, work-life balance, emotional labour and emotional intelligence, and how they influence the well-being of employees.
She is currently working with groups of health and social care professionals (such as doctors, nurses and social workers) investigating the factors that underpin emotional intelligence with a view to enhancing stress resilience and well-being in these occupational groups.
Gail has published widely in the field of occupational health psychology and regularly presents her work at national and international conferences. Her work has also been regularly featured on radio, TV and the international press.
Hilary LawsonHilary Lawson is a registered social worker and lecturer in social work and post-qualifying social work at both the University of Sussex and the Open University. She is also director of Hilary Lawson Partnerships, a training and consultancy company focusing on work-based learning.
She worked for 12 years in local authority social work before becoming a lecturer and initially taught social work theory and practice, and child and adolescent development, on qualifying social work programmes. She currently delivers post-qualifying courses for social workers and other social care practitioners who want to develop their skills in facilitating the learning of social work students. She also teaches supervision and management courses at post-qualifying level.
Hilary’s work spans both social work and also the nature of learning and being a student. She has worked as a counsellor and advisor of students, and been instrumental in the development of university student support systems. Her doctoral research was a qualitative study of young people making the transition to university and the effects this had on their developing sense of self. She has expertise in adolescents’ experiences of starting university and the nature and effects of learning. She is now exploring the concepts of identity and transition more widely as they relate to people’s personal and professional lives.
She has recently completed a contract with the “Fostering Changes Training Centre” based in the Specialist Adoption and Fostering Team at Maudsley Hospital where she contributed to the development of parenting materials for the use of foster carers (now published by BAAF 2011). She also trained local authority and independent social workers and foster carers in the use of these parenting strategies throughout the UK.
She has researched and published on effective supervision of staff, developing reflective practice and all aspects of practice education. Her company, Hilary Lawson Partnerships, works with local authorities in a consultancy and training role to develop work-based learning throughout the organisation, including training social work and social care staff to offer high quality student placements, mentoring and supervision.
Publications include “Practice Teaching-Changing Social Work” (2001) and “Learning, Identity and Learning about Identity: the role of connectedness” (2008)
Contact and more information:
Dr Hilary LawsonHilary.lawson4@gmail.com
Hlpartnerships.net
Janet LeeJanet is a Registered Sick Children's nurse, specialising in paediatric intensive care and high dependency care. She works for Triangle with children with complex health care needs, providing training, consultation and expert opinion. Janet is employed part time by the Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals Trust, and she is also a visiting lecturer at the University of Brighton.
Ann Lewis
Ann Lewis leads a unique research group of around 30 academics, at the University of Birmingham, focusing on disability, educational inclusion and special needs. She is a member of the Lamb Inquiry and specialist advisor to the House of Commons Select Committee on SEN.
She has a long-standing research interest in exploring with children their views, particularly those of children with disabilities or special needs. This is reflected in her many publications including My school, my family, my life: Telling it like it is. A study drawing on the experiences of disabled children, young people and their families in Great Britain in 2006 (with Sarah Parsons and Christopher Robertson, DRC 2007) Researching Children’s Perspectives (with Geoff Lindsay, Open University Press 2000) and Children’s Understanding of Disability (Routledge 1995).
Her current work is examining the particularly tricky issues in exploring the ideas of children with autism concerning self and spirituality.
Jennie LindonJennie Lindon is a chartered psychologist, who runs her own consultancy and training business, People Consulting Ltd. Jennie has more than three decades of experience working with early years, educational and play services for children and families, and with professionals involved with looked-after children and young people.
An established author, Jennie has over thirty books published. Recent publications with Hodder Education include child development books referenced in her guide to cognitive development on this site. She has also specialised in writing to cover the whole span of 0-19 years with Safeguarding children and young people and Guiding the behaviour of children and young people (both with Hodder Education). Her publications with Practical Pre-School Books have focussed on early childhood and include Parents as partners and the What does it mean to be …? child development series covering each year within early childhood.
Rosemary Loshak
Rosemary Loshak qualified as a social worker in 1979 at the London School of Economics, specialising in mental health, then worked for five years in Suffolk in a child care team. She moved to an inner London borough in 1984 as a child mental health social worker in a hospital based CAMHS team, where she remained for 18 years. She maintained her interest in adult mental health and for two years she divided her time between CAMHS and adult outpatient work in a hospital based service offering brief psychodynamic treatment to adults in psychosocial crisis or following self-harm. In 2002 she became ‘Coordinator for children in families with mental illness’ in the local authority in which role she set up and managed a Children and Adult Mental Health Project (CHAMP) team from 2002 -2009. She is now retired but works privately as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist having trained at the London Centre for Psychotherapy.
Pearl LuxonPearl Luxon is a freelance consultant and trainer in safeguarding children and vulnerable adults and is also a Methodist minister. She worked as a probation officer in Middlesex for many years. Up to summer 2010 she was safeguarding adviser for the Methodist Church of Great Britain and the Church of England nationally. She lives in London with her family including two teenagers and two cats.
Irena Lyczkowska
Irena Lyczkowska is a senior social worker in the Post Adoption and Post Care Team at the Catholic Children's Society (Arundel and Brighton, Portsmouth and Southwark).
Dr James MacCabeDr MacCabe is honorary consultant psychiatrist at the National Psychosis Service, south London and the Maudsley NHS Trust.
This is a service for patients from anywhere in the UK who suffer from psychotic disorders but have not responded well to standard treatment. He also conducts population research into the causes of schizophrenia, at the Institute of Psychiatry in London where he is clinical lecturer in psychiatry.
Natalie MacGarvieNatalie MacGarvie has been working in the Deaf Community for 10 years in various educational settings and alongside this, now works for Triangle facilitating children and young people’s consultative groups, for mainly those who use sign language. Natalie acts as a communicator between children and others, both individually and in groups and also consults directly with children. Natalie has trained in British Sign Language at the University of Sussex and is NVQ4 Language qualified. Natalie has been involved in various Triangle training, supporting Deaf colleagues with interpretation and voice over and taken part in the production of new training resources. She provides regular communication and admin support for a Deaf colleague and has undertaken some advocacy work. Natalie is also part of the admin team, supporting project work and administrative duties and taking the office anchor role from time to time.
Andrea MacLeodAndrea MacLeod is a Lecturer in Autism Studies at the School of Education, University of Birmingham, where she co-ordinates courses directed at professionals who support adults with autism and Asperger syndrome, including social workers and social care staff. Prior to taking up post at the university she spent many years working in the voluntary sector, developing innovative models of support for adults with autism and Asperger syndrome, including self-advocacy groups, models of supported living and supported employment. She is also a member of the Autism Centre for Education and Research (ACER) based within the University of Birmingham and has been involved in a number of research and educational projects related to the autism spectrum. Andrea has a particular interest in outcomes for adults on the autism spectrum and has published in both academic and practitioner journals.
Samantha MannDr Samantha Mann graduated from the University of Portsmouth in 2001 with a PhD (funded by the ESRC), which involved analysing the behaviour of high-stake liars and truth-tellers, specifically suspects in their police interviews. She then showed clips of these suspects to police officers to see if they could tell when they were lying or truth-telling.
This research culminated in her thesis “Suspects, Lies and Videotape: An investigation into telling and detecting lies in police/suspect interviews”. She is now a research fellow at the University of Portsmouth, working with Professor Aldert Vrij on enhancing deception detection through increasing cognitive load in interview situations. She has published a number of journal articles and book chapters in the area of deceptive behaviour and detecting deceit.
Ruth MarchantRuth’s background is in developmental psychology. She works mostly with disabled children and with very young children; assessing their needs, enabling them to give evidence and giving expert opinion and communication advice to the courts. Ruth has been a Registered Intermediary with the Ministry of Justice since 2007. Ruth has taught and published widely in this field, writing the guidance on interviewing disabled children for Achieving Best Evidence, and the guidance on assessing disabled children in the Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families. Ruth co-directs Triangle, an independent organisation working with children across the UK. Triangle provides a range of services including expert opinion to the courts and skilled communication support, both to children with communication impairments and to very young children. Triangle has consulted with more than 2500 disabled children about their lives, their experiences and the services they use.
Alison MarshmanAlison Marshman was teacher-in-charge of a language unit from 1988 – 2006, when she retired from teaching. She completed an MEd in Speech and Language Difficulties at Birmingham University in 1995 and became a tutor on a Distance Education Course at the same University, a post she continues to hold. She was awarded a scholarship to look at educational provision for children with speech and language difficulties in the USA, where she developed an interest in teachers’ use of language in the classroom. Government funding enabled her to carry out a small-scale research project concerned with the effectiveness of teachers’ use of non-literal language. In 2005 she received the Award for West Midlands Special Needs Teacher of the Year and, in 2006, undertook a study tour to Nairobi, Kenya funded by the Centre for British Teachers Education Trust, supporters of the Teaching Awards. This visit enabled her to establish international links and share knowledge, skills and experience related to speech, language and communication difficulties.
Lynn MartinLynn worked as a teacher and community education tutor, for over 20 years. This involved working extensively with children and young people in groups and on a one to one basis. She has a masters degree in Professional Studies (Counselling), an Advanced Diploma in Counselling and a Specialist Skills Certificate in Counselling Children and Adolescents. She is also an accredited hypnotherapist, NLP practitioner and a transactional analyst psychotherapist in clinical training.
As managing director of Quality Training UK, she works extensively as a freelance trainer and consultant, and specialises in developing new courses and in house training programmes, both for the caring professions and within the commercial world. Lynn is also a qualified and experienced counselling supervisor.
Lynn currently offers a free counselling service for local young people alongside her private counselling practice, working extensively with children from the age of four years and young people with anger management issues.
Alex MasardoDr Alex Masardo is a Research Fellow in the School of Health and Population Sciences, University of Birmingham, where he works closely with members of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics and the Centre for the Study of Global Ethics. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Policy, University of Bath, where he completed an MRes in European Social Policy and later his doctorate on shared residence in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences. His research interests include looking at contemporary understandings of family life and emerging trends in social policy and family law around post-separation care arrangements for children, particularly in comparative perspective.
Adrian Matthews
Adrian has been working with refugees and asylum seekers for much of his professional life. In 1994 he joined the Refugee Legal Centre (RLC) as a caseworker specialising in presenting appeals against refusal of asylum before the immigration courts.
In 2000 he was appointed regional manager for RLC at Oakington lmmigration Detention Centre. Oakington fostered a particular interest in age assessment as significant numbers of age disputed cases were detained as adults. In late 2003, Adrian set up and managed the Refugee and Asylum Seeking Children's Project at the Children's Legal Centre (CLC) based at the University of Essex.
In 2004, CLC in conjunction with Cambridge Social Services organised the first national conference on age assessment bringing together lawyers, social work practitioners and managers. Since 2007, Adrian has worked as a senior policy development officer for the Children's Commissioner for England, Sir Al Aynsley Green where he has a specific brief for asylum-seeking children.
David McDonaldDavid is a qualified social worker and probation officer. He worked as a probation officer in Berkshire and Slough before becoming a Senior, Assistant Chief Officer and later, Head of Service. He left the Probation Service in 2001 and worked as an independent consultant focusing on youth justice and crime prevention. In 2003 he was appointed as the London Regional Manager for the Children’s Fund and later the Children’s Lead Officer for the Government Office for London. In 2005 David transferred to the Home Office to lead the Department’s contribution to safeguarding children and vulnerable adults. Within this role he was the principle Government advisor on the prevention of child trafficking and was responsible for the Children’s section of the UK Action Plan on Tackling Human Trafficking and “Working Together to Safeguard Children Who May Have Been Trafficked” In July 2009 David joined the National Safeguarding Delivery Unit as the Home Office lead expert on child protection. He retired from the Civil Service in July 2010.
Fiona McEwen
Her doctoral research, at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, was on social development in typically developing children and those with Autism Spectrum Disorders and she has continued autism research as a Postdoctoral Fellow. She is also carrying out research on the association between childhood animal cruelty and family violence, and researched a recent briefing document for the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology: Pets, Families, and Interagency Working (POSTnote 350, January 2010).
Her doctoral and postdoctoral research has been supported by the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Autism Speaks, and the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA).
Ruth McGovern
Ruth has 15 years experience in health and social care, working with both adults and young people. A qualified social worker and eclectic humanistic counsellor, her specialist interest is drug and alcohol. Ruth has worked in a wide range of community and residential services including arrest referral schemes, youth offending substance use work, probation, therapeutic communities, as well as supervising a community drug and alcohol team. Ruth is currently employed within a research team working evaluating the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of screening, brief interventions and stepped care with alcohol users. She has PhD in Sociology from Newcastle University, researching crack cocaine cultures in an area in the North East of England.
Will McGovernWill is a senior lecturer in the School of Child, Family and Community Studies at Northumbria University. His professional background has been developed predominately in the areas of substance use, offending behaviour and domestic violence in the community, voluntary, charity and statutory sectors. Will's previous role before joining the university was as a specialist substance misuse involvement officer for the Commissioning and Reform Directorate of the NHS.
He is currently working to complete a PHD in Sociology at Newcastle University around the concept of substance use and help-seeking behaviours.
Margaret McGowanMargaret McGowan has worked as an education adviser and writer for 14 years, many of them as publications manager for the Advisory Centre for Education. Now a freelance consultant, she currently provides legal advice one day a week to parents of children with statements of special educational needs on behalf of the Independent Panel for Special Education Advice. This provides a useful reality check for her main occupation of writing materials for professionals and parents. These have included website advice on school transport and complaints, input to policy documents and government guidance on special education and bullying, and training materials for volunteers and advocacy workers on special education and exclusion from school.
Margaret works with a range of organisations including Council for Disabled Children, the Who Cares Trust, Lawpack, Centre Forum and Save the Children.
Brendan McGrathBrendan McGrath has worked for Gloucestershire County Council since 1987, and currently holds the post of Private Fostering Advisor. He qualified as a social worker in 1980 and has worked in residential, youth offending and fieldwork prior to taking up his current post in 1998. He has been a long-standing member of the BAAF Special Interest Group on private fostering and contributed to various working parties and research projects in relation to private fostering. He provides training courses on behalf of Gloucestershire Childrens Safeguarding Board, and the Gloucestershire County Council’s Children and Young People’s Directorate.
Pat McMullan
I have worked within the social work profession for more than 25 years. I am a qualified social worker, registered with the General Care Council and I have a diploma in therapeutic child care. I worked for much of my career within Kent social services, and during that time I gained experience working with very complex traumatised children initially within residential settings and finally within the wider general community. I worked for a period within fostering and adoption, followed by many years as a children and families social worker. Finally, I worked as a manager within an initial assessment team. I have run a variety of training courses over the years, mainly related to direct work with children and in relation to life story work. I have also had experience in co-running In Touch with Children courses. During my career as a social worker, I developed specialist skills in direct work with children. This has included:
The rehabilitation of children at home.
Life story work to prepare children for adoption/permanency.
Direct work focused on developing coping strategies to address issues related to trauma.
Helping children to develop an understanding of safe caring and developing an understanding of appropriate sexual boundaries.
In line with this work, I have given guidance and support to families who are caring for emotionally complex children. Since 2003, I have worked as an independent social worker and trainer.
Uma Mehta
Uma Mehta is chief lawyer in the Community Services Legal Team at the London Borough of Islington. She is a solicitor – advocate (higher rights civil-proceedings), LLB honours and has a diploma in child protection and a certificate in counselling skills. She is also a Law Society Children Panel member, an external Law Society assessor, a local authority representative LGG trainer and chair of the Law Society children’s sub committee.
Diane MelvinAs a chartered clinical psychologist Diane has worked professionally with different populations of children coping with adversity. Over the past 18 years Diane has worked at St Mary’s Hospital in London as part of the multidisciplinary team in the specialist Paediatric and Family HIV service where children and their parents with HIV attend for health care. In this post Diane has provided psychological input to over 500 children growing up with HIV infection as well as working with parents with HIV and other uninfected siblings and children. Establishing partnerships with many other agencies, both in the statutory and voluntary sector, has been a key element of this work.
Diane’s particular interests is understanding developmental and psychological outcomes for children with HIV and what influences, enhances, or interferes with progress, adjustment and coping, and managing knowledge of the diagnosis and wider disclosure.
Diane has published many articles on clinical needs of this population and she is a committee member of CHIVA (Children’s HIV association in the UK) and a founder member of the paediatric HIV psychology network. Over the years I have been involved in many teaching and research projects around HIV both in the UK and abroad, including some in Africa.
Ed MitchellEd is a solicitor specialising in social care law. He is the General Editor of Social Care Law Today (Arden Davies Publishing) and a Consultant Editor to the Mental Health Law Review and the Journal of Social Housing Law. Ed also writes a regular column for New Law Journal on community care and disability law and is a contributor on social care legal matters to various other publications including the Child and Family Law Quarterly and the Journal of Social Welfare Law.
Fiona Mitchell
Fiona Mitchell works as a social researcher. She has previously worked on studies about people who go missing, the experiences of young people who have runaway or who have been forced to leave home, and on service provision for young runaways. She is currently working for The Children's Society and as an independent consultant. The reviews that she has conducted for Community Care Inform have been completed while she was working as an independent consultant .
Comfort MomohDr Comfort Momoh, MBE is a FGM Consultant/Public Health Specialist with extensive experience of holistic women centred care. She is a researcher of women’s health and a strong campaigner/supporter for the eradication of FGM. She established and runs the African Well Woman’s Clinic at Guy’s and St Thomas Foundation Trust in 1997. Comfort acted as an expert witness for the All Party Parliamentary Hearing on Female Genital Mutilation for England and Wales in 2000 and for Scotland in 2005. Representing the World Health Organisation in the next World Congress of Gynaecology and Obstetrics in October 2009 in South Africa (XIX FIGO). She received award from the Queen of England as a Member of British Empire (MBE) in 2008 for services for women’s Health and Honorary Doctorate Degree same year from The Middlesex University. Comfort provides training and conferences at local, national and international levels. A visiting lecturer at King’s College London (University of London).
Dr Raja MukherjeeDr Raja Mukherjee is a consultant psychiatrist for people with learning disabilities with a special interest in neurodevelopmental disorders across the lifespan. He runs a specialist neurodevelopmental assessment clinic for specialist diagnosis of people on the Autistic spectrum or with neurodevelopmental disorders and complex behaviours across the lifespan. As part of his specific research interest he has developed an expertise in Fetal Alcohol syndrome since discovering the lack of knowledge and research in the UK over 7 years ago. Since 2006 he has undertaken clinical evaluation and supervision of over 40 children exposed to prenatal drugs and alcohol. He is particularly interested in how FASD fits into the wider neurodevelopmental picture and whether it has a specific behavioural phenotype. Dr Mukherjee has spoken at over 50 local, national and international conferences related to FASD and has given expert advice to the DOH, BMA, and a House of Lords subcommittee on FASD.
Jayne MumfordJayne is currently working as an independent child care consultant advising children and young people’s social care departments. She has 21 years post-qualifying experience as a social worker and 12 years as a manager working with children and families in statutory, voluntary and private sector organisations. Additionally, she is a registered foster carer. She holds an MSc in forensic psychology and her research dissertation “Foster Carers Experiences of Caring for Sexually Abused Children in the UK. An IPA Analysis”, was completed as part of this qualification. This research study was chosen as a result of her experiences of working with substitute carers and sexually abused children both as a social worker and a foster carer.
Eileen MunroEileen Munro is a Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics. She was a social worker for many years before taking up an academic career. She has studied philosophy, in particular the philosophy of science, and this has fuelled her interest in the reasoning skills needed in social work. Her current research interests are in how best to combine intuitive and analytic reasoning in risk assessment and decision making in child protection. She is also studying the role of the wider organisational system in promoting or hindering good critical thinking. In collaboration with SCIE, she has been adapting the systems approach to investigating adverse events in aviation and health to the social care field. Recent publications are a second edition of her book Effective Child Protection, published by Sage, and ‘Managing Societal and Institutional Risk in Child Protection;, in Risk Analysis.
Mary MustoeMary Mustoe is a registered social worker who runs her own company focusing on leadership and communication skills. She draws on over 30 years experience in social work and related fields. Mary has worked in a range of roles - volunteer, trainer, practitioner, and middle and senior manager. Her work experience includes probation, health, further and higher education, and the third/voluntary sector. Mary has a master’s degree in social work and a postgraduate award in Professional Practice with Children and Families.
Mary continues to develop and deliver training including risk management, leadership and management and core skills. In addition, over the last 10 years she has taken part in extensive training in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and non-verbal communication. As a qualified coach she works with managers, leaders and experienced practitioners to develop their own reflective and analytical skills and to extend their practice through use of emerging models and techniques. To contact Mary go to mary@marymustoe.com
Lisa NandyLisa Nandy is the policy adviser for young refugees at The Children’s Society. She currently chairs the Refugee Children’s Consortium, a coalition of leading voluntary organisations working on behalf of refugee children.
Previously Lisa was a policy and research officer at the youth homelessness charity, Centrepoint, and authored the report, ‘Waiting In Line: Young Refugees in the Labour Market’. She has also worked for Neil Gerrard MP, chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Refugees. Lisa has a masters degree in public policy and is a school governor at a primary school in west
Tony NakhimoffTony runs TNC Enterprises, a consultancy specialising in change, transfomation and organisational development, along with management development and project management. Before establishing TNC Enterprises, he was organisational development manager for Barnet’s Children’s Service. Among many other things too numerous to mention, his role in Barnet involved developing and integrating the children’s workforce and implementing new technology solutions allied to business change. He sees great value in the development of the workforce as the major agent for change.
He worked in Barnet for nearly 15 years in various corporate roles across the authority, and worked in the children’s service for nearly 10 years. His previous roles in the public, private and academic sectors have included change manager, management consultant, marketing and PR professional, journalist, video producer, trainer, senior lecturer, information manager and puzzle compiler!
Wendy NoctorWendy is a qualified social worker and has worked in the public sector for a number of years across several local authorities in frontline child protection work covering the spectrum of child care service provision. She joined the NSPCC in 2001 initially as a practitioner in the Specialist Investigation Services team before going on to management posts which involved supervising staff to provide quality services for children and young people.
Her other roles in the NSPCC have been within the inspection unit where she has been involved with quality assurance and undertaking individual management reviews to improve safeguarding practice, and she is currently based within the NSPCC Child Protection Consultancy service as a senior consultant, working with a wide range of organisations for the purpose of influencing and assisting in the improvement of safeguarding practice with children and young people.
Wendy has been a member of various Area Child Protection Committees (now known as Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards) and sat on serious case review panels, as well as contributed to reports aimed to identify organisational learning to effect positive change regarding safeguarding practice with children and families. She recently led a Northern Ireland project commissioned by the government to work with trusts as part of a drive to improve safeguarding practice, which involved developing and piloting safeguarding audit tools and then writing practice guidance to support their use.
During her career, Wendy has dealt with complaints from service users and is currently carrying out independent reviews of complaints at stage 3 of the complaint process on behalf of a large organisation. Wendy sees influencing others to achieve change as a key role for inspection and consultancy work and enjoys working at all levels to assist the improvement of practice. She has a keen interest in services working with children under the age of eight as she sees early intervention as an area where positive impact can be made.
Kieran O'Hagan Kieran O’Hagan qualified as a social worker in 1974, and specialized in child protection work in inner city areas for over twenty years. He was a Principal Case-worker (Child Abuse) in Leeds, and Guardian ad litem serving the Northeast of England. In 1991, he joined the School of Social Work at Queen’s University, Belfast. As Reader, he carried out research into how health, social care and educational staff were responding to a minority linguistic group in N. Ireland. He has published eight critically acclaimed books on child abuse and related topics, and scores of articles for national and international journals. A feature of his books is the use of fiction to dramatize the emotions and trauma observed in much health and social care practice. His first social work novel The Verdi Solution was published in 2009.
Charlie Orrell Charlie Orrell is a Registered Intermediary with the Ministry of Justice, supporting children’s communication with the police and courts. Charlie is a qualified speech and language therapist. She specialises in working with children with physical and/or learning difficulties, their families and other professionals in their lives. She has a particular interest in supporting children who are non-verbal to develop alternative methods of communication.
Christine Osborne Chris was until recently a Policy Adviser at The Children’s Society with the lead role developing The Children’s Society’s programme of work with disabled children and young people. Early in her career Chris set up PACT, one of the first family based short term care services for disabled children and went on to manage a wide range of children’s services in The Yorkshire and Humberside Region. Chris has always championed the rights of disabled children and young people, including co-ordinating the award winning Ask Us Initiative. She has co- authored practice guidance for DCSF on safeguarding disabled children and contributed to statutory guidance for Independent Reviewing Officers on working with children with additional communication needs. Chris was until recently chair of The Council for Disabled Children. She is currently a member of both The Communication Trust and The Standing Commission on Carers and now works as an independent consultant.
Nathalie Noret
Nathalie Noret is a developmental psychologist and the co-director of the unit of adolescent research at York St John University. Her research interests focus primarily around adolescent peer relationships, in particular experiences and correlates of bullying and the development of friendships. Recently she has been involved in a number of research projects on the nature and prevalence of cyberbullying in children and teenagers and is particularly interested in children and young people’s use of ICT. Nathalie was a member of the DCFS cyberbullying task force which developed the cyberbullying guidance for schools and regularly presents at conferences and training days on the nature of cyberbullying and how to tackle this in schools.
Ian Partridge
Ian Partridge was born in Cornwall. After reading history at Cambridge he became a residential social worker in London, a decision acknowledged every year at Christmas by his late grandmother asking him: "When are you going to get a proper job?". He worked in various residential settings in and around London, qualifying at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, London in 1987 before moving to York to work in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. In CAMHS he worked both in the community and in-patient services specialising in working in the ares of eating disordes, family, therapy, bereavement, parental risk assessment and working with both victims and perpetrators of abuse. He provided training to a variety of disciplines in both health and social services and has co-authored many articles on mental health services both on clinical and managerial matters. He is the joint editor with Greg Richardson of CAMHS - An Operational Handbook (Gaskell, 2003) a second revised edition of which is currently in preparation. He lives in Bradford and is married to a consultant in child and adolescent psychiatry. In 2001 he escaped from social work by becoming a full-time house husband and dad, though he regularly teaches on a masters course for new qualified psychiatrists.
Jonathan Pearce
Since 2002, Jonathan Pearce has been the Director of Adoption UK, a national membership charity (and adoption support agency) for prospective adopters, adoptive parents and long-term foster carers, which provides information, advice, support and training. He has been closely involved in all the key adoption initiatives of the last six years, contributing vital input from the perspective of adoptive families. He is currently a member of the following bodies/initiatives:
He has a background in the voluntary sector, law and journalism. He worked for many years at the Legal Action Group (a charity campaigning for access to justice for disadvantaged groups) and also for Community Care magazine as a journalist specialising in adoption and children’s issues.
Debra Pearlman Debra graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1974, qualified in social work in 1977 and obtained a degree level qualification in law in 1995. Debra has over 30 years experience as a social work practitioner, trainer and manager primarily focussing on work with children and families. She was a Service Manager for the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) from 2001-2009 with responsibilities in public and private law.
From 2009 to 2012 Debra was employed by BAAF as the contract manager for the Independent Review Mechanism (Adoption and Fostering) for England. She has substantial experience of planning and delivering training within Cafcass and in her role at the IRM. Now she is working as an independent social worker and is a member of the Mental Health Review Tribunal for Wales (a judicial position) and a social worker member of the Fitness to Practice panels for the Health and Care Professions Council.
Debra has been working to support the development of a degree level social work programme at the University of Malawi in conjunction with Children and Families International Foundation and York university since 2011. Debra has a strong interest in the issue of domestic violence and was an approved trainer on Domestic Violence for the Probation Service. She was a director on the board of Leeds Women’s Aid for 13 years and is now involved with Jewish Women’s Aid. Debra is working in a voluntary capacity as a screener for a charity which provides casework and a range of support for asylum seekers.
Charlotte Pearson Charlotte Pearson is a freelance strategic consultant working with a range of public sector and voluntary organisations. Charlotte works in the areas of independent evaluation, strategy development, consultation and participation and social research. Charlotte has experience of research and evaluation in a range of areas including family support and Sure Start Children’s Centres. Charlotte has worked in strategic services, research and in an operational capacity as a substance misuse worker. Charlotte’s research interests include exposing the specific factors which contribute to change and improved outcomes for individual families who receive support services. Charlotte studied a BA Dual Hons in Sociology and Applied Social Studies, followed by a MA, both at Keele University. Charlotte is an Associate Member of the Chartered Management Institute. Charlotte lives in North Wales with her husband and two young children.
Mike PinnockAfter 37 years in local government, Mike is now an independent consultant and trainer specialising in developing outcome-orientated practices - mainly within partnership settings. Mike’s career began in Hull in 1973 as a trainee social worker. Since then he has managed a wide range of child care services including fostering, adoption, residential child care, and youth offending teams. He also has extensive experience of managing policy, planning, performance review and service improvement in children’s services, adult social care and housing. His last post was as head of commissioning and business support with Hull City Council’s Children and Young People’s Services where he had responsibility for the development of the Hull’s Children Trust. He also managed a wide range of support and enabling functions including training and staff development, asset management, information systems, voice and influence, commissioning, performance review, policy, planning, performance review and the city's Library and Information service.
Over the past two decades, Mike has acted as an advisor and support to a number of government research and development initiatives on service improvement in children's services and on outcome-based approaches. In 1998, he began collaboration with Mark Friedman, from the Fiscal Polices Studies Institute on applying the ideas of outcome-based accountability in an English setting. He was one of two local government representatives on the Performance and Inspection group of the Munro Review of Child Protection.
He is an advisor to the Child and Family Research Unit at Loughborough University. Married with two children, Mike’s hobbies include cycle touring, walking holidays with his family, playing acoustic guitar with the village band and cooking - Italian dishes a speciality.
Richard Pitcairn Richard is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Bedfordshire. His background is in working with children and families, and with looked after adolescents. He has worked in social services training for many years, with a main interest in practice teaching, following a period of working freelance as a trainer in social care, mostly for social services, but also for other bodies, including health services, education, and voluntary agencies. He now works on both the undergraduate and the masters degrees, with some involvement in post-qualifying awards, teaching theory and methods, communication skills, evidence-based practice and academic and professional skills.
Gretchen Precey Gretchen Precey has been an independent social worker, trainer and consultant since for 9 years. Her background is in local authority child protection work where she served as both a practitioner and a manager for fifteen years. As an associate of Triangle, an organisation based in Brighton that works with disabled children and young people, she has an interest in assessment, communication and protection issues concerning disabled children and offers training and direct assessment work in this area. She also has published papers on fabricated or induced illness and lectures nationally on this subject as well as appearing as an expert witness in civil cases concerning FII. Many of her current training commitments involve practice issues for child welfare professionals in implementing the common assessment framework.
Jonathan Price Jonathan is Policy and Communications Officer for the No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF) Network, based at Islington Council. Jonathan works on a number of NRPF policy concerns with government departments, including the UK Border Agency, the Interpersonal Violence Unit and the Department for Communities and Local Government. He manages the NRPF enquiry line, runs training sessions on NRPF and undertakes consultancy work for organisations in the statutory and voluntary sectors. Prior to joining the NRPF Network, Jonathan was a Researcher at the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees (ICAR), based at City University, London.
Richard Pugh
Dr Richard Pugh is Emeritus Professor of Social Work at Keele University and has written extensively on language policies and practice, child protection, and rural social work. He is a qualified social worker who has worked in the UK and the USA.
Penny Reeves Penny has been a magistrate since 1982 and belongs to the Gwent Bench which comprises 330 magistrates. Penny joined the Domestic Panel in 1985, then the Family Proceedings Panel following its creation by the Children Act 1988. In 2002, Penny was appointed Chair of the South-East Gwent FPC and the following year, helped steer the two FPCs in Gwent into one county-wide Gwent FPC, consisting of 50 magistrates, and becoming its first Chair. Penny also sits on the Local Family Justice Council for SE Wales, as well as Family Court User Groups for Gwent and Mid-Glamorgan. Penny have worked with the Judicial Studies Board on developing continuation training for FPC Chairs, as well as on the development of the reference books for use in Family court. Penny is married with two daughters, both of whom live in Australia, and now writes biographies, after a lifetime spent writing features.
Jane Robey Jane Robey is Chief Executive Officer of National Family Mediation. Before becoming CEO Jane was a practising NFM family mediator, Professional Practice Consultant and NFM service manager. She trained as a family mediator in 1996. She qualified as a probation officer in 1984 and worked in probation, family court welfare, CAFCASS and in child protection social work for 20 years before taking up the role of Chief Executive Officer.
Jane is married with 2 teenage sons, an allotment and a range of tap dancing shoes!- all well worn!
National Family Mediation is the only voluntary sector provider of family mediation. NFM and its member services provide high quality family mediation for families experiencing relationship breakdown divorce and separation. NFM founded the principles and practice upon which mediation is based and provides its member services with quality assurance standards policies and procedures. NFM is a provider of foundation family mediation training and is an accredited Continuous Professional Development provider for practising family mediators.
Carol Robinson Carol Robinson began her career as a social worker with Essex County Council. She then undertook a PhD in social psychology at the University of Bristol. Afterwards she went into research and became a Reader in the University’s Norah Fry Research Centre where she carried out studies relating to support services for families with disabled children. She also had a period of secondment to the Social Services Inspectorate as an analytic inspector (now CQC) before becoming Director of the South West Learning Disability Network known as SWALD. Carol then went onto work part-time for the Care Services Improvement Partnership’s Valuing People Support Team and also for the South West Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership. Both roles involved working regionally to improve opportunities for young disabled people, adults and their family carers. She is now a freelance consultant and researcher.
James Rucker Dr James Rucker is a clinical research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry and honorary specialist registrar in Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in South London. He practises clinically at an early intervention service for schizophrenia and other psychotic illnesses, which provides specialist assessment and treatment for patients with psychosis, and at the National Affective Disorders unit, which provides national level assessment and intervention for patients with a broad range of treatment-refractory mood disorders. His research interests include the genetic and neurobiological basis of psychosis and affective disorders.
Dr Alan Rushton Alan Rushton spent many years as a social worker in both child and adult mental health services in the UK and in Canada. For over 25 years he was Director of the MSc programme in Mental Health Social Work at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London where he continues as Visiting Professor. He has been engaged in follow-up studies of older, abused children adopted from care and in predictors of placement outcome. He has published many academic papers and several books including ‘Adoption support services for families in difficulty’ and ‘Enhancing Adoptive Parenting: a parenting programme for use with adopters of challenging children”. He has recently completed mid-life follow up of British Chinese ex-orphanage adoptions. He is a trustee at the Post-Adoption Centre in London.
Suzan Sayder Suzan Sayder is a child and adolescent psychotherapist working in London at the Tavistock Clinic and the Brent Centre for Young People. She is currently involved in community-based project with first time teenage and young parents during pregnancy and with their infants.
Dr Sara Scott Dr Sara Scott is co-director of DMSS Research & Consultancy, an independent organisation undertaking research, evaluation, training and consultancy in health and social care. Clients include goverment departments, national voluntary organisations, and regional and local government. She is co-author of the Mayor of London's third State of London's Children report (GLA 2007). Sara has been involved in research in the fields of sexual violence and mental health for over 15 years. She is an experienced programme evaluator committed to the development of outcome focused policy and practice.
She began her working life as a play worker and community artist and then enjoyed a first career in educational and social action broadcasting: working with the BBC, ITV companies and Channel 4 to develop programming and support on topics such as AIDS, adult literacy, breast cancer, drugs and debt. Her role involved developing campaign and communications strategies to reach "hard-to-reach" groups via the mass media. From 1999 to 2001 she was director of The Gender Training Initiative at the University of Liverpool - a Department of Health funded project developing training for staff in prisons and the secure psychiatric sector. From 2001-2007 she held the post of principal research officer at Barnardo's where she lead a programme of research on sexual exploitation. Her book The Politics & Experience of Ritual Abuse: Beyond Disbelief is published by Open University Press (2001).
Lorraine Schaffer
Lorraine is the Director of the Centre for Mediation and Conflict Resolution at the Institute of Family Therapy (IFT) and Chair of the postgraduate programme of courses in conflict resolution and mediation studies run by IFT in collaboration with Birkbeck College, University of London. Lorraine has been a practising family mediator since 1995. Previously Lorraine worked as a social worker with adolescents and families and as a tutor on the Diploma in Social Work at Brunel University. Lorraine's other professional training was a two year course at the Tavistock Clinic - the "Advanced Course in Consultation to Individuals, Groups and Organisations". Lorraine has written articles for the Journal Mediation Practice, Family Law and previously for various social work journals. She is one of the mediators interviewed for a newly published (2007) book Developing the Craft of Mediation by Marian Roberts.
Peter SelmanPeter Selman is Visiting Fellow in the School of Geography, Politics & Sociology at the Newcastle University, UK. His main areas of research interest are child adoption, teenage pregnancy and demographic change & public policy.
He is currently Chair of the Network for Intercountry Adoption and a member of the Board of Trustees of the British Agencies for Adoption & Fostering. He is editor of Intercountry Adoption; Development, trends and perspectives (British Agencies for Adoption & Fostering, 2000) and has written many articles and chapters on adoption policy.
His main research focus in recent years has been on the demography of child adoption with a special emphasis on intercountry adoption. He has presented many papers at international conferences on this topic and has acted as research consultant to international organizations such the United Nations Population Division, the Hague Conference on Private International Law and the Innocenti Research Centre in Florence..
Clare Seymour Clare Seymour is a senior lecturer in social work at Anglia Ruskin University. She teaches social work law, communication and interviewing skills, and professional accountability to social work students at undergraduate and masters level. Her social work experience includes 16 years of local authority social work, latterly in a child care team where she had wide experience of court work, and bereavement support within a general practice. She is the author, jointly with Richard Seymour, of Courtroom Skills for Social Workers (2007), Exeter: Learning Matters.
Shelter Shelter is a charity that works to alleviate the distress caused by homelessness and bad housing, providing confidential advice to people with all kinds of housing problems. It tackles the root causes of bad housing by lobbying government and local authorities for new laws and policies, and more investment, to improve the lives of homeless and badly housed people. As a leading expert on housing in Britain, Shelter develops practical solutions to address the housing crisis. It also works with the housing sector to promote good practice, publish reports and deliver professional training.
David Shemmings Professor David Shemmings has been an academic for nearly 25 years producing over 60 publications, many of which discuss research on child protection. He began his career working with traumatised adolescents and then became a senior manager in social services. He is currently Professor of Social Work at the University of Kent, prior to which he worked at Middlesex University and UEA.
Yvonne Shemmings
Yvonne Shemmings has trained child protection professionals for the past 12 years, prior to which she was a local authority social worker, team leader and manager. For more information, visit www.yvonneshemmings.co.uk.
Lorraine Sherr
Professor Lorraine Sherr is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Clinical and Health Psychology at UCL, London. She graduated from Warwick University and worked as a clinician at St Mary's Hospital London prior to embarking on an academic career at the Royal Free and University College Medical School. She is editor of three international academic journals and has a wide portfolio of research in HIV and AIDS as well as children and pregnancy issues. She has worked both nationally and internationally and recently co-chaired the learning group on Families and HIV for the Joint Learning Initiative on children and HIV and AIDS (JLICA).
Jean Simons
Jean qualified CQSW and gained an M.Sc in Social Work Studies from the LSE in 1979. She worked in the London Borough of Greenwich, in the Paediatric and Maternity Units of the then Brook Hospital and the British Hospital for Mothers and Babies, before moving in 1981 to become the first Sargent Social Worker at Great Ormond St Hospital. This involved the support of families where a child was diagnosed with cancer, or an Immune Deficiency, requiring debilitating treatment, including bone marrow transplantation.
Jean subsequently became a social work team manager for the London Borough of Camden, based in the Hospital, also an Honorary Lecturer in Social Work at Middlesex University, and was closely involved in the setting up and subsequent work of the Hospital’s Paediatric Palliative Care Team.In 1992, working with a Steering Group of professionals, and bereaved parents from the hospital, Jean founded the Child Death Helpline, and managed this national service, later jointly with Alder Hey Hospital, until moving from Great Ormond Street in 2006.
As Assistant Director: Family Policy, Jean was responsible for leadership of the Hospital’s Patient and Public Involvement initiatives, including the development of a Patient Forum and the Trust’s supportive response to families affected by the Organ Retention issues in the early 2000s. As the Trust’s Head of Interactive Communication, she undertook teaching and training of all grades of health and social care professionals in communication, particularly with bereaved parents. Jean moved to FSID in 2006, after many years of involvement with the work of the charity, to become the Support and Education Manager; responsible for all aspects of the organisation’s work with bereaved parents, including managing the Helpline and the Befriending service.
John Simmonds John Simmonds is director of policy, research and development at the British Association for Adoption and Fostering (BAAF). Before starting at BAAF, he was head of the social work programmes at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a qualified social worker and has substantial experience in child protection, family placement and residential care settings. He has published widely including co-editing with Gillian Schofield, the Child Placement Handbook, and has produced good practice guidance on The Role of Special Guardianship and Best Practice in Permanency Planning for Children, both published by BAAF.
He has recently completed a research study on unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in foster care with the University of York and is currently involved in two other projects: the first a follow up study with the Institute of Psychiatry of 100 girls adopted from Hong Kong in the 1960s; and the second an investigation of special guardianship with the University of York. He is the adoptive father of two children, now adults.
Emilie Smeaton Emilie is research director of Paradigm Research and has extensive experience of carrying out research, evaluation and consultancy addressing marginalised and vulnerable children and young people and their families. She is author of numerous publications relating to their lives and experiences including, running away, living on the streets, sexual exploitation, parental substance misuse, domestic violence, mental health, living in care, involvement in substance misuse and the criminal justice system. Emilie works with national and international charities, government, the police, local authorities and academic institutions.
She has previously worked with Railway Children, The Children’s Society and University of York. She has also worked as a practitioner in both the UK and India in services addressing the needs of street children, homeless young people and sex workers. Emilie is a trustee of the National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People (NWG).
Zofia Smith
Zofia is a community paediatric dietitian in the Children's Community Nutrition & Dietetic Service in Leeds. Over the last 12 years, she has specialised in failure to thrive and feeding difficulties, working with two specialist teams in the Growth and Nutrition Service supporting infants and young children, and their families. She has worked in dietetics for the NHS since qualifying in 1976. Zofia initially worked as a senior paediatric dietitian specialising in inborn errors of metabolism. This was followed by clinical work in community dietetics, including teaching of health professionals and students. In addition, she undertook a year-long period of research into coronary heart disease. Zofia continues with her clinical work and teaching in the area of failure to thrive. She has also written a number of articles in her specialist field, as well as contributing to a chapter on faltering growth in the latest edition of 'Clinical Paediatric Dietetics'.
Rikki Sneddon Rikki Sneddon; MA, CQSW, Diploma in Child Protection Studies, has worked in the field of Child Protection and Child Welfare for over 20 years. He has operated as a specialist Child Protection Social Worker, Acting Fieldwork Manager and as Child Protection Lead for Social Work and the local Child Protection Committee (CPC). Rikki is committed to improving standards of practice and to better supporting practitioners with accessible and relevant materials. He has developed and delivered on Child Protection Training across the spectrum of professional requirements from foundation through to advanced with both single and inter agency staff.
Rikki maintains a direct statutory strategic and operational role working in a Local Authority but also has broader input across the UK as an Independent Trainer/Consultant. He provides specialist training in the areas of Risk Assessment, Child Neglect, Emotional Abuse and Teenage Intimate Partner Violence as well as delivering to specialist Police courses in Scotland.
Links
Key Papers in Child Welfare & Child Protection 2006 on Fife Council CPC Site and Web Resource Directory on Social Service Knowledge Scotland (SSKS)
Dr Jo Staines (nee Lipscombe)
Dr Jo Staines (nee Lipscombe) is a teaching fellow at the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, where she has been involved in research, dissemination and teaching activities since 1998, contributing to both undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, including the BSc Childhood Studies and the MSc Social Work.
Until 2007 she was a senior consultant with a national crime reduction charity, working closely with the Youth Justice Board. Her role there included the development and dissemination of policies and practice initiatives for children at risk of becoming involved with anti-social or offending behaviour. Jo’s doctoral thesis explored young people's experiences of remand foster care, and was partly funded by the Home Office. Current research interests include the interface between the criminal justice and care systems, the criminalisation of children and childhood, and the implementation of restorative justice approaches.
Jo has published articles in a range of national and international journals, including the British Journal of Social Work, Child and Family Social Work, and Youth Justice. She is author of Care or Control? Foster care for young people on remand (BAAF, 2006) and Fostering Adolescents (with Elaine Farmer and Sue Moyers, Jessica Kingsley, 2004).
Laura Stock
Laura Stock is a researcher and consultant at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations, with a background in researching disadvantaged children and young people that are vulnerable to social exclusion. Her recent work includes evaluating the Child Poverty pilot: Delivering Improved Services for Separating Parents (DfE), to explore the effectiveness of provision for children living in poverty experiencing family breakdown and the evaluation of Right Here to support the mental health of young people that fall through the gaps in statutory service provision (Mental Health Foundation).
Her main interests include teenage pregnancy, young people’s mental health, family separation, migration, community cohesion and integration.
Laura has experience in conducting research with vulnerable BME groups, including Roma, refugees and asylum seekers. She has a particular interest in anthropological and culturally sensitive research approaches, action research and participatory methods with young people.
Ann Stuart Ann Stuart is a retired police officer. Ann joined the police in 1979 and retired in November 2009. During her service Ann assisted in setting up one of the first domestic violence units in London in the Borough of Tower Hamlets in 1990. In 1997 Ann joined the child protection team covering the London Borough of Redbridge and Waltham Forest and spent 4 years investigating some of the most serious crimes against children and a number of historic child abuse cases. In 2001 during the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbie Ann became the dedicated policy officer for child protection in the Metropolitan Police and revised, wrote and published the policy and standard operating procedures for Child Abuse Investigation. Ann was involved in the development of a number of publications including the first national police guidance in Safeguarding Children and Child Abuse Investigiaton in 2005 and the first London Child Protection Procedures and was on the working group that revised the Home Office Circular titled - ‘The duties and powers of the police under The Children Act 1989’ which relates to the police power under S46 - Police Protection as referred to in this guidance. Ann has written child protection policy for various charities and sport organisations.
Ann remained as policy officer until November 2008 when she took over as training manager of the Child Abuse Investigation Command training unit to oversea the delivery and revision of joint child protection training with social workers, Achieving Best Evidence training and the delivery of the Specialist Child Abuse Investigative Development Programme for police as developed by the National Police Improvement Agency.
Ann has been awarded 4 commendations relating to her work as an investigator in the field of Domestic violence and Child Abuse Investigation.
Alison Talheth Alison has a DMS in public management and has held various management roles across both adult and children’s services in Nottinghamshire County Council and Nottingham City Council. She represented the director of social services on the project board of the NHS Direct pilot in Nottingham and has also been closely involved in the development of other NHS projects on local and national levels.
She was senior manager at Leicestershire County Council, taking on the lead role in promoting the health and education of children in care. During her role as operational manager of Nottingham City Council’s emergency duty team, Alison undertook a review of the service and was responsible for the implementation of a number of key changes together with improvements in the delivery of this service, including the co location of the team with NHS Direct. In addition to this, she has worked for Women’s Aid and was a member of a voluntary management committee for a local community family centre and nursery.
Alison is now director of social work at the Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Families Association (SSAFA) Forces Help, heading the organisation’s personal and social work services worldwide, and is the responsible person of the fostering and adoption service, as well as holding the lead on safeguarding, together with the Ministry of Defence Executive Safeguarding Board, for the MOD Children and Young Person’s Trust Board. She has also continued as an associate lecturer with the Open University.
The Fostering Network The Fostering Network is the UK’s leading charity for all those involved in fostering. We are committed to raising the standards of care for children and young people who are fostered throughout the UK.
We have a membership of more than 55,000 foster carers, almost all local authorities and health and social services trusts, as well as independent fostering providers and local foster care associations.
As the UK’s voice of foster care we work with our members to share knowledge and best practice, promote foster and campaign for positive changes in foster care.
For more information about our membership packages, campaigns, policy work, publications, training, conferences, consultancy and information services, please visit our website at http://www.fostering.net/ or contact us on 020 7620 6400
The Shared Care Network Shared Care Network was founded by short break scheme organisers who felt a need for a co-ordinating national body to share information and promote good practice in this newly developing field. It was registered as a charity in March 1990. Today, Shared Care Network represents around 180 services UK wide that provide short break services to support disabled children and their families.
The Shared Care Network Vision
The Network’s vision is of a society where disabled children & young people and their families can enjoy full social inclusion.
The Shared Care Network believes easy access to reliable, flexible and enjoyable short break services is a vital component in achieving this change.
Dr June ThoburnDr June Thoburn is an emeritus professor of social work at the University of East Anglia. She qualified as a social worker in 1963 and worked in local authority child and family social work and generic practice in England and Canada before taking up a joint appointment (with Norfolk County Council) at UEA in 1979. As a founding director of the Centre for Research on the Child and Family and of the Making Research Count collaboration , she has a particular interest in finding innovative ways of helping social workers to use knowledge from a range of sources in their practice.
Her teaching and research have encompassed family support and child protection services for children and families in the community and services for children placed away from home, whether with family members, in foster care or with adoptive families. She recently completed a Leverhulme Foundation funded study of children in out-of-home care in 14 countries and has close links with researchers on child and family welfare issues around the world.
She is frequently asked to provide expert evidence (in the UK and abroad) in complex child welfare cases, and to undertake analyses of events leading to child deaths or serious injury. She was until recently vice chair of the GSCC and was awarded the CBE for services to social work in 2002. She is currently the chairperson of the Jersey Child Protection Committee.
Nigel ThomasNigel Thomas has been Professor of Childhood and Youth Research in the School of Social Work, University of Central Lancashire, since 2007. He was previously a social work practitioner and manager in Derbyshire and Oxfordshire, and then taught and researched in social work and childhood studies at Swansea University from 1992. He has conducted research with looked after children, with young carers, and in children’s rights, advocacy and participation, including a number of projects with children and young people as researchers. He is co-director of The Centre for children and young people’s participation. His publications include Children, Family and the State (2002), Social Work with Young People in Care (2005) and Children, Politics and Communication (2009). He is co-editor of A Handbook of Children and Young People’s Participation (2010) and of the journal Children & Society.
Caroline Thompson
Caroline Thompson qualified as a social worker and worked in child protection for many years before taking the decision to work as an independent trainer and consultant. She also spent five years as a non-executive director of a health care trust. Since then she has worked closely with several local authorities on projects as varied as developing an induction and assessment programme for overseas social workers to the implementation of a series of research based practice tools and the roll out of the common assessment framework. Enjoying both the chance to read and to write, Caroline particularly values the opportunity to spend time seeking out relevant research studies or policy documents and integrating these as practice bulletins and training resources for child care professionals. She even enjoys writing procedures.
Dr Neil ThompsonDr Neil Thompson is the managing director of Avenue Consulting Ltd. He has held full or honorary professorships at four UK universities. He has over 150 publications to his name, including 31 books, many of which are bestsellers. He has also produced a number of education and training DVDs. He has been a speaker at conferences and seminars in the UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Norway, Greece, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, India, Canada, the United States and Australia. He has qualifications in social work, training and development, mediation and alternative dispute resolution and management (MBA), as well as a first-class honours degree, a doctorate (PhD) and a higher doctorate (DLitt). Neil is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Society of Arts, and a Life Fellow of the Institute of Welsh Affairs. He is also the editor-in-chief of two online communities, Well-being Zone and Social Work Focus.
Sarah Thompson
Sarah Thompson is an experienced qualified social worker, who specialises in adoption work. She qualified in 2005, gaining a degree in social work and a Post Qualification in 2011. Sarah also holds a BA (Hons) degree in Psychology. She is an ardent learner who is committed to her on going professional development in social work.
Sarah currently works in an adoption team, but also has extensive experience across children’s social care services where she has been involved in safeguarding vulnerable children and children-in-need cases.
Sarah is employed by Rotherham MBC local authority children’s services where she carries out assessment work with prospective adoptive parents. She holds a strong belief in adoption for looked-after children who are unable to remain with the birth family, and is committed and enthusiastic in ensuring best practice considerations are maintained when moving children on.
Peter Toolan is a Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychotherapist. He trained at the Scottish Institute of Human Relations, Edinburgh and Tavistock & Portman Clinic, London. He has 25 years experience of working with children, adolescents and parents, much of this in NHS Child & Family Services in the North East of England. He is a well known teacher and clinical supervisor for CAMHS and Social Care professionals. His published writing and research on learning disabilities looked after children and on infants’ and children’s emotional development has been well received. In recent years he has pioneered now thriving community Infant Mental Health clinics in South Tyneside and Newcastle and helped to establish and then teach on the MA Psychoanalytic Observation Studies course at Northumbria University in Newcastle. In 2003 he joined the UK’s largest independent foster care agency (Foster Care Associates) as Consultant in Psychotherapy for their therapeutic services. He speaks at numerous conferences throughout the country and currently runs a highly regarded 10 week course on Infant Mental Health, which has been delivered very successfully in Edinburgh, Newcastle and Aberdeen.Dr Eva Tsouana
Dr Eva Tsouana is currently working as a registrar in community paediatrics in the Warwickshire Primary Care Trust. This post is part of the paediatrics rotation. Eva graduated from Athens Medical School in Greece and started her medical training in the UK in 2006. Eva became a Member of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in October 2008. Eva is a member of the Young People's Health Special Interest Group. Eva's special interest lies in paediatric neurology and her career goal is to become a consultant Paediatrician with a special interest in epilepsy.
Gary VauxGary Vaux manages a team of local authority benefit and debt advice workers. He is also chair of the Social Security Advisers Group at the Local Government Association and represents the ADASS in meetings with the DWP. For 25 years, has written, trained and broadcast on welfare benefit rules and policies. As well as writing a regular column in Community Care magazine, he has produced benefit guides for CPAG, YouthAid, Fostering Network, Family Rights Group, Law Society, One Parent Families, "Yours" magazine and many other organisations. His interests (apart from his family, Spurs and Bruce Springsteen) are those areas where social security and social services interests overlap, coincide or clash.
Neil Ventress
Neil comes from a background of almost thirty years of social work practice with children and their families as a social worker, a manager, and as an inter-agency trainer. After starting his career with a short period as a residential social worker Neil moved to fieldwork in 1977, and he gained his Certificate of Qualification in Social Work in 1982. He has since gained qualifications in management, a Masters Degree in Social Work Studies, and the GSCC Advanced Award in Social Work.
From 2007 to 2011 Neil enjoyed a post as a senior lecturer at Teesside University, where he taught on both the undergraduate and post-qualifying social work programmes and was Programme Leader for the university’s post-qualifying programme for social workers working with children, young people, their families and carers. He also led the university’s Achieving Best Evidence programme, training social workers and police officers in investigative interviewing with children.
Neil is currently an independent trainer and consultant, and he continues to focus on safeguarding children. His principal research and writing interests are around the field of child neglect, although he also has an interest in inter-professional safeguarding education, and in 2007-9 Neil was an active member of the Project Advisory Group for a large-scale piece of research funded by the DoH/DCSF on the effectiveness of inter-agency safeguarding training.
Jim WalkerJim Walker is an independent social worker and psychotherapist. He previously worked at the Clermont Unit, a specialist child protection unit in Brighton. He now works independently. He has a particular interest in attachment theory, trauma, dissociative states and post-traumatic stress disorder. He was an associate lecturer at Sussex University from 2002-2007 and taught on a range of social work courses. Jim has written widely about unresolved trauma and child protection; communication and social work from an attachment perspective; and the relevance of attachment theory to fostering and adoption.
Sue WallbridgeSue Wallbridge is currently employed as a practice research officer with Sheffield City Council’s children and families service, and as a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, teaching safeguarding on the undergraduate Early Childhood Studies course. Prior to becoming practice research officer in 2007, Sue had almost 25 years experience as a local authority social worker, working mainly with children and families. Her most recent social work post, from 1999 to 2007, was based in a maternity hospital, conducting pre-birth assessments.
Mitzi Waltz
Dr Mitzi Waltz is a Lecturer in Autism Studies at the University of Birmingham’s Autism Centre for Education and Research (ACER), with which she has contributed to several key research projects. These include the Autism Education Trust report on the state of autism education in England, and the Inclusion Development Programmes for autism released by DCSF in 2009. Her areas of research interest include the history of autism, the impact of media images of autism, the particular needs of BME and ‘hard to reach’ families, and working with people on the autism spectrum as research partners. She also has an academic background in media and cultural studies, with an emphasis on disability studies, and is the parent of a young man on the autism spectrum.
Linda WardLinda Ward is Professor of Disability and Social Policy at the University of Bristol and former director of the Norah Fry Research Centre, which undertakes applied research and teaching in relation to disabled children and adults with learning disabilities. She was previously an advisor on disability to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Linda has researched and published widely in the field of learning difficulties and disability, with a particular interest in equal opportunities, ethical issues, support to disabled children and their families (especially at transition) and research to bring about policy and practice change. Areas of work at the moment include support to parents with learning disabilities and their children and the experiences of offenders with learning disabilities in the criminal justice system. She is also currently acting as a specialist adviser to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights’Inquiry on Human Rights and Adults with Learning Disabilities.
Lyla Ward
Lyla has over 25 years of experience as practitioner and manager in the Probation and Youth Offending services which includes managing staff working with adult and young sexual and violent offenders prior to and after the implementation of Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA).
Lyla has always had specialist interests in risk and public protection, young offenders, effective resettlement practice and multi agency partnerships and was responsible for the implementation and coordination of MAPPA across the 32 London Boroughs together with colleagues from the Police and Prison services as well as partner agencies. She was part of the consultative group that produced the initial National MAPPA Guidance 2003 and was also a member of the project team which developed ViSOR, the electronic national database for sexual and violent offenders.
Since 2006 Lyla Ward has been a full time partner with Wardell Associates, a risk and public protection training consultancy working with Criminal Justice and Safeguarding partnerships. A recent focus has included working with Safeguarding agencies to inform their understanding of sexual offending and with Youth Offending Services to improve their multi agency approach to the assessment and management of the risks posed by and to young people using the ONSET and ASSET frameworks for early intervention/prevention work and statutory youth justice involvement.
Dr Jean Ware
Jean Ware is Reader in Education (Special Educational Needs), School of Education and Lifelong Learning, Bangor University. She was previously Director of Special Education, St Patrick’s College Dublin. She has worked as a teacher, mainly with pupils with severe and profound and multiple learning difficulties and as a university teacher and researcher at both the London University Institute of Education and Cardiff University.
Vikki Watkins
Since graduating from University of Teesside with a degree in criminology in 1993, Vikki has held a number of positions in the field of social care. These include working as a special needs teacher in Brooklyn, New York; establishing and managing a supported independence project for young people leaving care, managing a local authority children’s home and looked after children’s team before becoming a principal officer for corporate parenting. Vikki completed her Diploma and Masters in Social Work at Bangor University in 1999 and her Advanced Child Care Award in 2003. She is currently employed as service manager for the safeguarding service within children’s services in Bridgend County Borough Council; a post she is finding both challenging and rewarding.
Debby WatsonDebby Watson is a research fellow at the Norah Fry Research Centre, University of Bristol. Her main research interests concern the involvement of disabled children in research and services, particularly children with complex health care needs and communication difficulties. Other interests include issues for families bringing up a disabled child and research ethics. She has recently been working on a research project entitled ‘Participation in Education’, looking at ways in which disabled children with little or no speech can be involved in their education. She was previously a social worker, including running a short break service for children with learning difficulties.
Flo Watson
Dr FA Watson has degrees in Sociology, Criminology, Social Work and Social Policy. Her doctoral research examined decision-making about boundaries of information-sharing and risk assessment in social work. She is currently a Safeguarding Team Manager at Norfolk County Council and formerly Cafcass’ Research Officer.
Previously she has worked as a Probation Officer in Canada, Children and Families Social Worker in Leeds, and Child Protection Coordinator in Bracknell. From 1999 to 2004 she was Lecturer in Social Work for Norwich City College where she completed research about effective teaching practice for social work ethics and values.
Ferelyth WattFerelyth Watt is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist in Tower Hamlets CAMHS (East), based at the Emmanuel Miller Centre. She has a background in youth work, development education and teaching prior to training at the British Association of Psychotherapists. She is responsible for leading the development of under 5’s input in the East and is committed to the development of accessible provision for this age group both within Tier 3 settings and those in the community, such as Children’s Centres. Ferelyth has developed a project for short-term work with under 5’s and their parents/carers in a community setting. Integral to her work is her interest in cross-cultural work and both the theoretical and clinical implications for working with a diverse ethnic and religious client group. Ferelyth is undertaking a doctoral research project in this area. Ferelyth is also developing a multi-disciplinary complex needs assessment model and is particularly interested in the overlap between Autistic Spectrum Disorders, Learning Disabilities, ADHD, neglect and trauma.
Jan WayJan Way has worked in social work for over 30 years and in adoption for almost 21 years. She has specialised in intercountry adoption since the mid 1980s and now works as the training and development manager for Intercountry Adoption Centre in London. In addition she still undertakes assessment work with prospective adopters for several local authorities and a voluntary adoption agency and sits on an adoption panel. She is an adopted person herself and is also the parent of a young adult adopted from overseas.
Colin WebsterColin Webster is Professor of Criminology at Leeds Metropolitan University. Professor Webster is Academic Consultant to the Youth Justice Board of England and Wales advising on ‘Changing the Risk Assessment Framework.’ He was External Assessor for the Open University’s and Youth Justice Board’s distance learning course for Youth Justice Managers, K288 ‘Delivering the Youth Rehabilitation Order.’ He has researched and published extensively in the areas of ethnicity and crime, youth justice and social exclusion. His most recent book is Understanding Race and Crime (Open University Press, 2007).
He is currently co-authoring Poverty and Insecurity: Life in Low-pay, No-Pay Britain (Policy Press) and Youth On Religion: the development, negotiation and impact of faith and non-faith identity (Routledge). He has led research projects for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and has recently completed a large research council-funded study about religious identity and social cohesion with colleagues at Brunel and Middlesex Universities.
Amy WeirAmy has more than 30 years' experience of working in children's services. She qualified as a social worker in 1978. She has worked in social care, health and the voluntary sector. She was the national lead inspector at the Social Services Inspectorate for Quality Protects and children's services performance. She was previously Deputy Director of Social Services in Somerset. She worked for DfES as an adviser for Every Child Matters until 2006. She currently works independently with local authorities on supporting improvements in children's services particularly in relation to safeguarding. Amy has always been interested in policy and practice development. She is very enthusiastic about the development of the Community Care Inform website and has been very pleased to be able to contribute to it. She sees it as an exciting tool for learning and developing practice.
Kirk Weir
Dr Kirk Weir (Consultant Child, Adolescent and Family Psychiatrist; Suffolk) Kirk Weir is a UK trained medical practitioner who has specialised in child psychiatry for more than 30 years. He was an NHS Consultant Child Psychiatrist in CAMHS in London and Suffolk. Alongside clinical work he developed a role as an expert witness in the Family Court. He has given evidence in hundreds of private and public law cases to Courts in most areas of England and Wales. Following his experience of giving expert evidence during the epidemic of ritual sexual abuse cases he developed a special interest in children as witnesses. Over the last ten years he has taken a particular interest in children who are the subject of high conflict contact disputes between their separated parents.
Murray WhiteMurray White represents the UK on the International Council for Self Esteem, an organisation formed in 1990 and now established in over 70 countries. Its goals are to promote the concept of self esteem and its significance in individuals and society and to facilitate the co-ordination of self esteem activities and projects throughout the world. A head teacher for 30 years, in 1990 the Institute of Social Inventions gave Murray the education award of the year for his pioneering work introducing circle time and said “ it could be used with advantage in all schools.” Recognised internationally as lecturer and consultant he has presented workshops and keynotes in Europe, USA and all over the UK.
His interactive workshops are designed to enhance self-esteem in many settings, including families, schools, organisations and for individuals. He has organised two British conferences on self-esteem. He has contributed to many books and journals and is the author of 50 Activities for Raising Self-esteem ( Pearson Publishing) and Magic Circles: Self-esteem for Everyone In Circle Time (2nd edition Sage Publications November 2008 ). This is intended for use by children, teenagers and, new to this edition, adults as well.
His main studies in psychology, counselling and therapy were undertaken at the University of Surrey, the Psychosynthesis and Education Trust London and The Parent Network, London. Details of his work can be seen on his website: www.murraywhite-selfesteem.co.uk
Susan WhiteSusan White is Professor of Social Work (Children and Families) at the University of Birmingham. She qualified in social work at the University of Leeds in 1983 and was employed as a practitioner and manager in statutory children’s services until 1995 when she accepted an academic post. Her research has focused principally on the analysis of professional decision-making in child welfare, with a particular emphasis on safeguarding. She has recently completed two influential Research Council funded studies. The first focusing on electronic information sharing in multi-disciplinary child welfare practice and the second on the relationship between the performance management of public services responsible for safeguarding children, and the impact of anticipated blame on those providing, supervising and managing these services. Sue was a member of the Social Work Task Force and currently sits on the Social Work Reform Board. She is a member of the reference group informing the Munro Review into reducing bureaucracy in child protection. She is currently Chair of the Association of Professors of Social Work and Editor in Chief of the international journal, Child and Family Social Work.
David WilkinsDavid Wilkins is a principal child and family social worker for the London Borough of Enfield. David has also worked as a senior lecturer in social work for Anglia Ruskin University and is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Kent, supervised by Professor David Shemmings. David has published various articles on the topics of attachment theory, disabled children and child protection, and is a member of the Assessment of Disorganised Attachment and Maltreatment Project.
David has worked in social care for over 10 years, primarily with disabled children in need of protection. However, David has also worked in child and adolescent mental health services, in behaviour support services and with disabled adults.
Jane WilliamsJane Williams is a barrister and a senior lecturer at the School of Law at the University of Swansea.
She was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1980, and stayed in private practice as a barrister until 1985. From 1985-1995 she worked in the Legal Adviser’s Branch at the Home Office in London, before being seconded to the Civil Service College where she worked until 1998. She was assistant counsel general for the National Assembly for Wales between 1999 and 2000 before moving to join the law department at the University of Swansea. She currently lectures in the School of Law at the university on subjects including legal issues in social work.
Her research interests include devolution and divergence in law and policy; children, rights and citizenship; multi-level policy implementation (especially relating to human rights); legal issues in public service delivery (especially social care). She is a member of the Wales UNCRC Monitoring Group.
She is a widely-published author and her latest publication is Child Law for Social Work which was published by Sage in 2008.
Sue Williams
Sue Williams is the Senior School Improvement Officer for Inclusion and Safeguarding (interim). She trained to be a secondary school teacher in the late 1970s and taught for seven years before taking a career break to raise a family. During this time she tutored part time at the local FE College. She returned full time in the 1990s and moved to the primary phase. As part of her re-training for this new work she gained a Post Graduate Diploma (Early Childhood Education) and an MA in Educational Studies. This higher level of study had a Special Educational Needs (SEN) focus as she had become the school’s SEN Co-ordinator (SENCo) and was leading the local SENCO Network. In addition, she undertook day release from school and evening work at Edge Hill University College.
In 2000 she began work for Liverpool Authority where she passed her Ofsted training in Inspection Skills, gained the National Professional Qualification for Headship and School Improvement Partner (SIP) accreditation. She currently manages a team of Inclusion Development Officers, leads on the Dyslexia Friendly Schools Scheme and the Inclusion Charter Mark, trains and supports school staffs in inclusion and safeguarding issues and works as a SIP.
Tim WilliamsTim Williams is a clinical psychologist who has been working with children in Berkshire for three decades. He has held posts with the University of Reading and Berkshire Healthcare NHS Trust. Together with a psychiatrist colleague he set up a clinic for children with repetitive behaviour problems 15 years ago with the aim of improving treatment. They developed the current model of cognitive behaviour therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) there and in Oxford working with Professor Paul Salkovskis. The clinic became the base for two randomised controlled trials of CBT for young people with OCD.
He is currently concerned with establishing the viability of self-help approaches to OCD and identifying the extent of OCD in populations with communication difficulties. Tim’s other interests include autism spectrum disorders and developing evidence based approaches to interventions and assessments in child and adolescent mental health.
Mary Jane WillowsMary Jane Willows has spent all of her working life working with children and young people.
After years of experience in a variety of settings she established a charity providing care and support for disadvantaged parents and children under five. Alongside this she was teaching child care in college and running parent craft and drama classes in a men’s prison
Fifteen years ago, whilst still running the charity, she was diagnosed with CFS/ME (from which she has now recovered). Once she was back on her feet, she moved into work with social services as an inspector of residential care homes for children, adults with learning difficulties and older people.
Her next post was three years as the head of care for three residential children’s homes, a parent and baby home and a school held for three years.
She has been with the Association of Young People with ME for five years and feels that working with the members is a real pleasure and an inspiration, and what keeps them going through the daily challenges they face in raising awareness and funds!
Gaynor WinghamGaynor Wingham has a social work career spanning over 35 years, and has worked within social work and education services, at practitioner and senior management level. She has always had a particular interest in the interface between services and promoting good multi agency working within children and adult services. She had a longstanding interest in the application of research to social work practice, and supporting post qualification development. She regularly contributes to professional journals and policy forums.
She now works independently and runs a successful consultancy, Professional Independents, providing training and consultancy within the statutory and independent sectors. She has established a comprehensive service for complaints investigations, management enquiries and independent case reviews working with associate consultants.
Johanna Woodcock RossJohanna Woodcock Ross is a qualified social worker who is now a Senior Lecturer in Social Work and Programme Lead for the BA (Hons) Social Work. Her published research and teaching interests surround the ‘assessment of parenting’; ‘social work communication skills’; and ‘social work practice strategies’.
Her most recent work includes the forthcoming book ‘Specialist Social Work Communication Skills’ , the research and evaluation for which she received Fellowship of the Centre for Excellence in Professional Placement Learning and Innovations Funding. She enjoys using creative and innovative research and teaching and learning methods. Johanna was the Chief Investigator for the recently finalised government funded national research and regionally funded research evaluating the Choosing Health Policy for people with Severe Mental Illness. This builds on her published research into professional practice strategies concerning infant mental health and parenting assessment. Johanna has considerable experience in teaching post-qualified graduate students undertaking higher specialist degree programmes in Social Work with Children and Families.
Dr Jane YeomansJane Yeomans originally trained as a primary school teacher and taught in primary nursery and special schools. She is now a specialist senior educational psychologist working as a practitioner for Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council in the Midlands and as an academic and professional tutor for initial and post qualification doctoral programmes in Educational Psychology at the University of Birmingham.
Her research interests include early years practice, reading acquisition/development and cognitive education, including the use of Dynamic Assessment. She is an external examiner for the Open University and is a verifier for the British Psychological Society Certificate of Competence in Educational Testing.
Her most recent publications, with Dr Christopher Arnold, are Psychology for Teaching Assistants, published by Trentham Books and Teaching, Learning and Psychology, published by David Fulton.