Lunchtime webinar series: Voice, participation and lived experience in children’s social care
Export to calendarAbstract
Across this series, the three talks explore how children’s social care can better recognise, include and respond to the voices of parents, young people and people with lived experience. Together, they consider what meaningful participation looks like in practice, and the skills, structures and organisational conditions needed to support more inclusive and effective child and family social work.
13 October, 12.30pm – 1.45pm (Seminar Room B and MS Teams)
Empowering voices: Parental advocacy and experts-by-experience in child protection and child welfare
This session brings together two presentations exploring how lived experience can shape child welfare and child protection practice.
Parental advocacy in the UK and Ireland: Empowering voices in child protection social work
The first presentation, by Dr Clive Diaz, Rees Centre, University of Oxford, examines parental advocacy services across England, Wales and Ireland, drawing on research with parents, social workers, parent advocates and senior leaders. It considers how advocacy can support parents to participate more effectively in child protection meetings, challenge information they disagree with and navigate complex systems. The presentation compares professional advocacy models in Wales and Ireland with peer advocacy approaches in England, highlighting the strengths, challenges and organisational conditions needed for effective implementation.
Epistemic injustice challenged and reproduced in experts-by-experience activities in social work and child welfare
The second presentation, by Tanja Koskinen, social worker and PhD student, University of Helsinki, Finland, focuses on experts-by-experience activities in Finnish child welfare. Drawing on preliminary findings from doctoral research, it explores how lived experience is recognised as credible knowledge within service development, and professional practice. It considers how these activities can both challenge and reproduce epistemic injustice, and reflects on what is needed to ensure meaningful participation and the legitimate involvement of experts-by-experience.
More information on the session.
10 November, 12.30pm -1.30pm (Seminar Room B and MS Teams)
What is good practice in working with parents in child and family work?
Effective children’s services need to work with parents, yet there is comparatively little research directly observing these often complicated and sometimes difficult conversations. The first half of this talk will share findings from studies observing over 300 recordings of practice to identify key features of effective practice. It will introduce a reliable coding scheme for core social work skills and present key findings from studies using these codes. The second half will compare the views of parents, care experienced adults and social workers with the coding scheme in relation to observations of practice . The seminar will conclude by proposing 4 core dimensions of good practice in working with parents in child and family social work and make suggestions for how individuals and organisations can support excellence in these areas.
More information on the webinar.
1 December, 12.30pm -1.30pm (Seminar Room D and MS Teams)
The unseen work: Relational principles in child protection
So much of child protection work goes unseen: the doubt a practitioner carries into a visit; the ground-level practice wisdom that never makes it into a report; the hidden strengths of a parent; and the fragile relationship that actually made the difference.
Too often, we are asked to prioritise compliance over connection. In this webinar, Richard Devine and Tim Fisher draw on their combined frontline experience – and the learning and leadership that followed – to explore how we can put relationships back at the centre of practice, both individually and systemically.
We will offer real‑world principles and examples of relational practice, showing how recognising the unseen aspects of our work can transform what becomes possible. We will also consider how to sustain motivation: to keep improving our practice, the systems we work within, and the experiences of children and families.
By the end of this webinar, participants will be able to:
- Name the core principles of relational practice and what they look like in child protection
- Hold complexity—about families, risk, and their own role—without retreating into certainty or risk‑averse practice
- Identify what goes unseen in their own work, and use that awareness to work more effectively with children and families
- Apply practical ideas and tools that support meaningful change in their day‑to‑day practice
Bio
Dr Clive Diaz is a Senior Academic Leader at the Rees Centre for Research in Fostering and Education. His research focuses on children’s social care, particularly children and young people’s participation, parental advocacy, and the implementation of national policy in frontline practice. He has led studies on children’s participation in care reviews, parental advocacy and family experiences of children’s services across the UK and Ireland. Clive has published widely and brings together academic, practice and therapeutic perspectives, drawing on his background in social work leadership and psychotherapy.
Tanja Koskinen (M.Soc.Sc.) is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a licensed social worker. Her research examines experts-by-experience in social work and child welfare, with a particular focus on epistemic justice and the ethical tensions that emerge in participation practices. Alongside her academic work, she has extensive professional experience in child welfare practice and the development of child and family services.
Professor Donald Forrester’s main interest is in what makes for effective child and family social work. In particular Donald is interested in the relationship between good practice and outcomes, and in understanding the features of organisations that produce good practice. More recently he has become interested in the opportunities and risks of applying AI into social work, with a focus on developing ethical and human-centred AI to support (and not replace) professional practice. He has led projects and programmes worth over £30 million, including setting up the Tilda Goldberg Centre, academic lead for the Frontline social work programme, founding the What Works Centre for Children’s Social Care, helping to found the Better Childhoods Centre in University College Copenhagen and the SCALE Centre for Social Care and AI research as well as leading CASCADE Centre for Children’s Social Care Research and Development.
Richard Devine is Head of Systemic Practice in Solihull Council with over 15 years’ experience in child protection. He holds a Master’s in Attachment Studies from the University of Roehampton and is a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cambridge. Richard is the author of Messy Social Work: Learning from Frontline Practice with Children and Families (JKP, 2025), and co-host of the Messy Social Work podcast. His work focuses on practice wisdom, relational approaches, and the complexities of frontline decision-making.
Tim Fisher FRSA is a social work leader and Practice Lead for England and Wales at Kinship, with over 20 years’ experience in child and family services. He is the founder of Relational Activism, a platform bringing together lived and learned experience to foster belonging and drive change across human services. Tim has extensive experience in local authority leadership, including over a decade as a service manager, and is a leading advocate for participatory practice, including Family Group Conferencing. He co-hosts the Messy Social Work podcast.
Event Details
Event Speakers
