Professor Hilary Land

Hilary Land joined Bristol in 1970 as a lecturer in Social Administration, with a focus on feminist analyses of social policy. Answers to the question: ‘Who cares for the family?’ have remained central to her research, teaching and activism ever since. She was active in the 5th Demand of the Second Wave Women’s Movement in the 1970s. Between 1978 and 1979 she was seconded to the Central Policy Review Staff (‘Think Tank’) Cabinet Office, giving her a different perspective of policy making.

Hilary returned to Bristol as a Reader and with feminist colleagues across the faculty, developed gender studies at Masters level. Between1988 and 1995 she was Professor of Social Policy at Royal Holloway University. In 1995 she returned to Bristol as Professor of Family Policy in the new School for Policy Studies and soon after, assumed the position of Head of the Children and Families Research Centre. She also served as Head of School between 1997 and 2000 before retiring in 2002.

In 2007 Hilary received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Social Policy Association. In retirement, she became active in the Women’s Budget Group. As a member of the Economy Task Group of Bristol’s Women’s Commission, she is currently campaigning to develop Bristol into a ‘caring economy.

Professor David Quinton

David Lloyd Quinton (1939-2016), retired in 2005 after a long and distinguished career. From 1994, he was Professor of Psychosocial Development, Head of the Children and Families Research Centre, and Director of the Hadley Centre for Adoption and Fostering Studies. As Professor Emeritus, he consulted to the Hadley Centre and the Department of Health, and in 2010, he received the Life Time Achievement Award from the European Society for Research in Adoption and Fostering.

Professor Quinton began his research career in 1963, and completed his PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College, University of London, rising to Senior Research Scientist within Professor Sir Michael Rutter’s MRC funded Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Unit. He led longitudinal studies of the adult trajectories of children who grew up in group homes, as well as children whose parents were treated for serious mental health problems. He also published research on the outcomes of adoption and long-term fostering for older children placed from within the care system, and tackled some contentious issues, e.g. contact, and ‘matching’ in adoptions from care.

Professor Quinton grew up in Birmingham and attended Quaker boarding schools, Sibford and Bootham before studying Anthropology at Cambridge.

Professor Elaine Farmer

Elaine Farmer is Emeritus Professor of Child and Family Studies in the School for Policy Studies at the University of Bristol, prior to which she spent several years as a social worker in England and Australia. She was Head of the Centre for Family Policy and Child Welfare (as the Centre was then known) from 2001 to 2006. In addition to social work teaching, she directed 11 major studies, most in government programmes funded by the Department of Health or the Department for Education. These studies have been extensively disseminated in the UK and overseas, thus contributing to the development of policy and practice.

Elaine has researched and published widely on kinship care, reunification, fostering, adoption, child protection practice and neglect and is author or co-author of ten published books, six on-line books or reports and many articles and book chapters. She has frequently been invited to present her work internationally and to provide policy and research advice here and abroad. She remains actively involved in child welfare issues, especially in the areas of reunification and kinship care, acts as an advisor to a number of research studies and is a Trustee for Kinship, a UK charity concerned with kinship care.

Emeritus Professor David Berridge

David Berridge was Professor of Child and Family Welfare in the School for Policy Studies between 2005-19 and Head of the Centre for Children and Families for eight years between 2006-14. Prior to joining the University he held research roles at the University of Bedfordshire, National Children’s Bureau and Dartington Social Research Unit. David contributed to undergraduate teaching in Social Work, Childhood Studies, Social Policy and Educational Psychology, as well as University widening participation initiatives.He supervised nine PhD students to completion as well as many Masters and Undergraduate students. Over a career spanning almost 40 years he was involved in some 40 research studies.

David’s particular research interests included:

• Children in care
• Children in need
• Residential care
• Institutional abuse
• Foster care
• Special education. This included managing a 20-year funded research programme with the NSPCC on child protection; and more recently a research collaboration with the Rees Centre, University of Oxford on the education of children in care and children in need.

David is author/co-author of 13 books and 100 other publications. Outside the University David worked closely with central and local government as well as children’s charities, including Professional Adviser to the House of Commons Education Committee (2012-17). In 2005, he was awarded the OBE for services for children.

Dr. Dendy Platt

Dendy Platt worked at the Children and Families Research Centre from 2005 to 2017, becoming Head of Centre in 2014. His academic contribution was social work-related and included child protection, assessment of children and families, and parents’ capacities to change. He was involved in several empirical studies in these areas, as well as evaluations of the newly qualified social worker and early professional development programmes in the UK. His most noted work includes his integrated model of parental engagement with services (Platt, 2012), subsequently described internationally as one of “two main conceptual models of parental engagement in interventions for at-risk families” (Chareste-Belzile et al, 2020).

Dendy was the originator of C-Change, a method of assessment of parents’ capacities to change where there are concerns for the children’s wellbeing (Platt & Riches 2016a&b). It has been used in both the UK and overseas mainly in practice but also in research. And he was involved in developing an innovative theoretical approach to decision-making at thresholds for interventions with children and families (Platt & Turney, 2014).

Dendy is best known publicly as co-editor of the 3rd edition of the textbook on assessment, The Child’s World (Horwath J & Platt D, 2019).

Dr Danielle Turney

Danielle Turney is Emeritus Professor of Social Work in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). A qualified social worker, she has been involved with social work education and research for many years, and has worked at Goldsmiths University of London, The Open University, University of Bristol and QUB.

Danielle’s research is underpinned by an abiding interest in using theory to inform, support and develop social work practice, and focuses on three broad areas related to children and families: relationship-based practice; child protection and family support with particular reference to child neglect; and critical thinking and professional judgement in social work assessment and decision making.

Recent research activity has included working with Beth Tarleton, University of Bristol, exploring professional practice with parents with learning difficulties where there are concerns about children’s wellbeing.

Danielle continues to focus on issues of family support for parents with learning difficulties and on relationship-based thinking and practice.

Professor Debbie L Watson

Debbie took up her position as Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the School in August 2007. She is currently Professor of Child and Family Welfare and Head of the Centre for Children and families Research.

Debbie is an experienced teacher in schools and in Higher Education. In particular, her interests have been in the sociology of childhood and in the health and wellbeing of children and young people. She is interested in co-productive research methods, creative and arts based research methods with children and publically engaged approaches to research. Much of her research and writing has been related to childhood identities and diversity and she has expertise in areas of childhood disability, children in the MENA region and in particular with children in care and adopted children.

Recent projects include working with the children’s charity Coram on their Post-Adoption Support Services (PASS) project where she researched adopted children’s and adopters’ perspectives on life storybooks as part of the child’s life story work. This project is linked to an AHRC REACT ‘Play Sandbox’ project that she led with a creative partner (Chloe Meineck) to develop a technologically enhanced keepsake box (called ‘trove’) for children in care to attach stories to their precious birth objects and keep their precious mementoes secure. Follow on AHRC funding has allowed this to be further co-designed with social workers, adopters, foster carers, children in care and adopted children with an integral multi-media app being part of the current memory prototype. This current work has focused on children’s narrative abilities and the use of their loved material objects in enabling them to participate in life story work in playful ways that allow some agency an control over the story of their life.

Debbie was also the academic lead on one of the ESRC funded Productive Margins projects called ‘Low-income families in Modern Urban Settings: poverty, austerity and participatory resistance’. This was a co-produced project working with two grassroots community organisations supporting families in poverty in Bristol and Cardiff. This resulted in innovative artistic outputs including a co-authored sociological fictional novel about lives on low-income and the roll out of the Universal Credit system which is available on Amazon.

Debbie is also involved in a network of activity with grassroots organisations called the Child Friendly City Network which aims to improve the situation for children in Bristol and has contributed to the development of the Children’s Charter in Bristol. Her work with civil society organisations is ongoing and includes projects with children’s centres exploring the impact of Somali parent volunteers on cultural awareness in primary schools and developing pre-school children’s sense of belonging in the city. She is also involved in the development of Bristol Play Strategy and in strategic work to address child food poverty in the city.

Research projects

• trove
• Life Chances
• Poo Patrol

Dr Heather Ottaway

Dr Heather Ottaway was Head of the Children and Families Research Centre from 2020-21. She spent seven years at the University of Bristol, from 2014-21, initially as a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Social Work with Children and Families.

In 2021 Heather left the University of Bristol to take up the role of Head of Evidence and Innovation at CELCIS, a leading improvement and innovation centre based at the University of Strathclyde. CELCIS works to improve children’s lives by supporting people and organisations to drive long lasting change in the services they need, and the practices used by people responsible for their care.

Heather’s national and international research primarily focuses on the support children, young people, their families and carers need in alternative care settings, including adoption, fostering and kinship care. Whilst at the University of Bristol she led two innovative studies exploring how to support the wellbeing of foster carers through understanding and addressing compassion fatigue.

Heather has also conducted work on the transformational reform of adoption services in England and Wales. She has recently led the Children’s Services Reform Research study in Scotland, which focused on improving the understanding of current structures and delivery models in children’s services, and how services can best support the needs of children, young people and their families.

Heather is a qualified social worker, and prior to leaving front-line practice worked for 11 years as a social worker within children’s services in Scotland and England, including within child protection, fostering and adoption.